J itibaren Shahrud, Regione di Semnan, Iran
The conceit of this book is whether a marriage can sustain an "unnamed" frightening illness that consumes the husband and literally removes him at intervals from his wife and daughter. Tim Farnsworth, a successful, accomplished attorney, has an affliction that intermittently overtakes him. He walks and walks and walks interminably, with no regard to inclement weather or safety hazards. It may be hours, days, or even weeks before he calls his wife, Jane, from a remote location to "pick me up." In the meantime, Jane and their daughter, Becka, live in constant fear when he disappears. Tim has been to every specialty MD and research scientist imaginable around the globe in order to diagnose and treat this illness. However, it remains a mystery. As his illness protracts, it strains the family's coping mechanisms, challenges the binding love, and threatens to unravel them. This could have been a spellbinding book. Tim's enigmatic illness is an inventive metaphor for any mighty stressor that can bewilder and impale a marriage. Ferris also uses it to explore the differentiation between mind and body and examine the breaking point of the human spirit. He brings alcoholism into the narrative, which is a clever analogy to the walking illness, as it raises many of the same questions, i.e., is it controllable? Can you conquer it with will--mind over body? Or does the body overtake the mind? These issues were implicit in the novel, but meagerly addressed. Too much narrative is spent on the grinding details of each walking episode and the frustrated search for a cure. Even the family interventions become repetitive after so many attempts. I was slogging through tedious, overwritten, and bloated iterations that descended into melodrama. And Ferris' use of stream-of-consciousness to illustrate Tim's intervals of incoherence was laced with awkward parody. The third person and very detached point of view was precarious to begin with; it eventually declined into one despairing note. Additionally, he threw in some red herrings and manipulated the reader around some close curves that abruptly or insincerely dissolved. There was so much potential here. I recognize the brilliant symbolism and the harrowing forces that encumber this family. Ferris is an adroit writer, in that he pens masterful metaphors and riveting ideas. But the narrative pounded like a sledgehammer of Tim's misadventures and devolved into a mere sketch of the family. He should have trimmed these episodes and concentrated on penetrating Becka and Jane; instead, he reverts to informational prose, telegraphing what happens and reporting on how Becka and Jane feel. The sequence of events is communicated through dry and hurried exposition as the climax approaches. It does not sustain, even if his purpose was to heighten the poignancy of Tim's absenteeism from his family. We are swallowed in Tim's illness without the balance of inner dialogue and animated experiences of Jane and Becka (which was present at the beginning of the novel but shifted into the illusory). We dryly observed rather than experienced. The climax was colorless and lost luster in the shadows of stream-of-consciousness. The story became sludgy and stultifying. I appreciate that Ferris experiments with different styles of writing and isn't stuck on one approach. I thoroughly enjoyed his first novel, Then We Came to the End, which was a socio-comic send-up of an ad agency in its final days. But The Unnamed was undisciplined and self-conscious. I encountered authorial autism and self-indulgence and I checked out emotionally way before I came to the end of this novel. This was a heartbreaking family, but the narrative style was unbearably numbing and prevented my surrender to the story. The execution undermined its purpose and thwarted its brittle beauty.