Every Shitty Book Is Shitty In Its Own Way

Someone, I can't remember who it was, once said that good books are all alike, while every shitty book is shitty in its own way.

That said, when it comes to shitty books, there are some through lines. Shitty books are a chore to read. Shitty books make you want to watch TV. Shitty books make you want to clean the basement.

Indeed, we've read a lot of shitty books, but I can't think of any as thoughtless and unsatisfying as Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, a book about a man in the professional-managerial class who has a condition whereby he must start walking until he collapses and falls asleep. Over the years he and his wife have managed the condition so that she'll know where to find him but one day she decides she has enough and lets him wander all over God's green earth until he — spoiler alert here — loses several toes to frostbite. Even though he's just an attorney he somehow has endless pots of money to use to indulge this condition and maintain a house in Connecticut. His wife eventually succumbs to cancer. He dies somewhere, maybe in a tent I think. I forget the ending because you kind of don't give a fuck in the end.

I can overlook effusive book jacket praise — great gobs of flabby unctuousness like "written with uncommon grace" or "rich and profound." I can overlook the self-serious author photo. I can overlook the thoughtless dialogue that sounds like it's the same person speaking over the course of 300 pages. I can overlook a seeming allegory that goes nowhere. Look, I can overlook a lot of things. What I can't overlook is the protagonist's wife telling him toward the end of the story, "Tell me you don't miss your tongue in my pussy. Tell me you can make any sense of this world without that, without your lips on my pussy, making me come."

Mama always told us that boys would only jerk you around and that it took a man to really make sweet love to you, and now I know what she meant by that. Which is to say, under the guise of supposed literary fiction, Unnamed does a bunch of genres in a really shitty, unsatisfying manner: there's a murder mystery that is never resolved; there's some kind of love story, I suppose; there's some sort of allegory that says . . . something?

Unnamed does none of this stuff well: The murder mystery falls by the wayside; the love story is a cardboard caricature of an older couple "in love"; The allegory crunches under your feet like so many dead bees which, along with the bad weather, are a sign of environmental despoliation that has to mean something but which you can't really see how it fits in. You wonder if pressed, the author would plead that those are your expectations and that this work is meant to challenge your expectations. You know what else challenges my expectations? Creighton University's men's basketball team. But at least they make some sense.

Two hundred and seventy-seven pages into Unnamed there's a moment where the protagonist talks about his journey and condition to a preacher out in the middle of the country somewhere. The preacher finally tells him, "So all you life you've searched and searched for a rational explanation, while presuming there is one. But if there isn't?" This is the precise point in Unnamed that makes me want to tear off my own toes. We — I — don't read books to be hectored about my expectations by marginal characters. If there's no rational explanation then we're done here.

Toward the end of Unnamed your mind wanders — you want something freaky to happen with the working class security guard the protagonist befriends. Like he's really a foot fetishist, who doesn't mind toeless men. Or that the real murderer of the high-powered client's wife is actually the protagonist, who doesn't even remember doing it. You want something bold to take place, and then the only thing that's bold is the protagonist's wife whispering about where she wants him to put his tongue. Not what I was thinking. Then you start to perseverate on the details of this overly researched book: Where does the money come from? How would you get a prescription for anti-psychotics from a clinic in the middle of nowhere? Toes just fall off like that? Seriously?

There's a joke — What's your writing process? Spellcheck! And that's how it seems — that it's kind of a vague idea, almost a first draft or maybe someone's MFA thesis. There's some sort of too-clever-by-half idea buried in there under a mound of self-important metaphor. It all feels heavy, burdensome.

The tone and tenor of the book remind you of something. At first, you're not really sure what — it's a familiar feeling that scrapes against the inside of your skull like a dull salon brush. And then it finally occurs to you — oh right, the video for Collective Soul's "The World I Know":

Wait a second, those ants are . . . us? Sublime!

There's no big gaping reason why Unnamed is the biggest piece of turd we've ever read, but I have some ideas. It feels like an allegory that you can't explain — and allegories are unentertaining enough without having it be so opaque that you're not sure what they're allegoring; a man, on a . . . journey! One of us wondered if it was borrowing from some other source, which would also make it seem burdensome and unentertaining — like the Odyssey or, uh, something else that people base stories on; in which case, you'd be lost and unentertained if you had no idea what that clever homage was. Ultimately you just kind of feel disappointed by current literary fiction — it's not particularly good, it doesn't mean much. Unnamed sticks out like a sore, uh, appendage in how little it says and how little passion there is. It feels like a book. It looks like a book. It appears tightly written but somehow says very little. And then you put it down and feel nothing, just unentertained by it all.