Stride Right

Whereas Illinois native Joshua Ferris, author of the award-winning debut novel Then We Came to the End, voluntarily relocated to New York, the protagonist of his thoughtful and unsettling second novel, The Unnamed, finds that a force beyond his control governs his physical movement. New Yorker Tim Farnsworth is a happily married father of one, and a full partner in a prestigious law firm.Yet when a strange affliction of which he has suffered two bouts in the past returns, this time for good, he must grapple with “the enormity of a crumbling life.”

The unnamed affliction simply causes him to walk. And walk and walk and walk. Terrifyingly, he cannot stop until the mercurial ailment suddenly grants him a reprieve, whereupon he collapses from exhaustion. Just before falling asleep or after waking up, he calls his wife and she dutifully picks him up, only for the cycle to resume shortly thereafter. Doctors are of no help in diagnosing his mysterious condition: “The psychiatrists believed his situation came from a physical malfunction of the body, something organic and diseased, while the neurologists pointed to the scans and the tests that revealed nothing and concluded that he had to be suffering something psychological.”

Underlying The Unnamed is an intriguing question—more intriguing even than that of the ailment from which Tim suffers: If one walks away—literally—from one’s life, what is left of oneself? For Tim eventually decides that, rather than remain handcuffed to his bed, he will duly walk when the uncontrollable urge overtakes him, and rather than call his wife from increasingly out of the way places— sometimes even New Jersey—when he is finished, he will take his problem elsewhere.Thus, the cross-country odyssey on which Tim embarks twothirds of the way through the novel comes as the conclusion to his growing estrangement from his normal existence.This begs two new questions:Will Tim’s long-suffering and stubbornly loyal wife, Jane, succeed in coaxing him back? Is an affliction of Tim’s kind so powerful that it can vanquish love?

Thankfully, Ferris offers no easy answers.

And his prose, especially when describing Tim’s physical travails and his later mental deterioration, somehow manages a distinctly lyrical quality even as it socks the reader in the gut. At one point, having removed his shoes following a particularly grueling trek, Tim glances downward: “His feet were like two engorged and squishy hearts.” And later: “Gaunt and weathered, limping sturdily, he walked the shoulder of the highway like a wasted beggar moving between two ancient persecuting cities.”

The main problem with The Unnamed is not that Ferris forgot to think out all the aspects of Tim’s condition (why doesn’t Tim choose the direction in which he walks, thereby asserting some control over the beast?), but that he has basically collapsed his protagonist into an affliction.We know little of Tim beyond his disorder.

Sure, he’s a criminal defense attorney—and there’s an incongruous subplot involving a client wrongly convicted of murder—but that’s not enough. Even before Tim’s affliction becomes all consuming, Ferris remains distressingly taciturn regarding the man’s beliefs, habits and likes and dislikes outside his struggle against his body’s bizarre impulse.

Nevertheless, there is no denying the novel’s philosophical heft, or its uncanny timeliness.What could be more disturbing than being afflicted with a unique disorder for which there is no name in an age characterized by the ubiquitous and comforting practice of classification and categorization? Even back when his ailment lay dormant in between flare-ups,Tim “lived in constant fear of a recurrence, as if he were an immigrant living in the country of his dreams whose fickle authorities could nevertheless decide without warning to take him into custody, nullify his freedom and dispatch him to sorrow and dust.”Time and again, Ferris evokes what it means to be truly and utterly alone; indeed, what could be lonelier than to fight against one’s own body? This, together with his profound examination of the role of circumstance in forging and changing one’s identity, compensates for his story’s weaknesses in character development, and ensures that The Unnamed emerges as a compelling and haunting novel.

-- The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Reagan Arthur Books, 320 pages, $24.99.