Tim Farnsworth is a handsome, healthy man, ageing with the grace of a matinée idol. He loves his work. He loves his family. He loves his kitchen. And then one day he stands up and walks out on all of it. He cannot stop walking. And, as his body propels him relentlessly forward, deep into the unfamiliar outer reaches of the city, he begins to realise he is moving further and further from his old self, seemingly unable to turn back and retrieve what he has lost.
Read an extract from the book on the New York Times website
Reviews
The New Yorker
Books Briefly Noted
"...the first half of the book reads like a shaggy-dog story, hobbled by a distracting murder subplot. But the second half is a stunner, an unnerving portrait of a man stripped of civilization’s defenses. Ferris’s prose is brash, extravagant, and, near the end, chillingly beautiful."
18/01/2010
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The Observer
Tim Adams
"Given the nature of the condition he imagines … Ferris risks a debilitating repetition. At times you feel he has been reading a lot of Beckett… But the novel is saved by a couple of things: Ferris's sharp sense of how relationships endure, and the nagging but never explicit suggestion that Farnsworth's illness or addiction speaks plausibly to the restlessness that all our bodies imply, an internal rebellion that mocks in particular the moneyed certainties of an outwardly successful American life."
21/02/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Martin
"...the audacity and dexterity on show make up for any flaws. The Unnamed can be tough to read because of the skill Ferris brings to his evocation of suffering, particularly in its final pitiless chapters, but it is clearly an important and individual work, a stage in the development of a significant talent."
15/02/2010
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The Literary Review
Sam Leith
"This is a very odd book, of high ambition and occasional pretentiousness. Its slightly choppy time-scheme, its lyrical account of landscape, its loose ends and detours, and its occasional straining for significance suggest a writer of formidable talents who’s not completely in control of his material. But what an imagination – and what a memorable conceit."
01/02/2010
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The Financial Times
William Sutcliffe
"The problem with The Unnamed is simply that – a little like his narrator – Ferris appears to have exercised his impressive energies and skills on a task of abiding pointlessness. If the novel wants to be read as a metaphor, the most obvious one is probably not intended. For walking, substitute writing, and this becomes a tale of an author with an inexplicable determination to head off blindly in a direction that makes no sense to anyone other than himself."
15/02/2010
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The Guardian
Christopher Tayler
"Apart from the tonal conflict between its various strands, the novel suffers from overwriting and from small but distracting grammatical eccentricities… In spite of these drawbacks, Ferris manages to breathe a spark of life into Tim and Jane, whose relationship eventually becomes quite moving."
20/02/2010
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The Sunday Times
Peter Parker
"Intriguing but ultimately disappointing... For the most part, The Unnamed is a grimly entertaining novel, but it begins to run out of steam long before Tim does... More worrying, Ferris’s aspirations towards fine writing often lead him astray."
21/02/2010
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The Washington Post
Ron Charles
"The first third, which has such irresistible drive and coherency, gives way to a scattered, largely impressionistic narrative that darts and skips through scenes spread across many years. Alternately moving and redundant and unrelentingly sad, the story frustrates our expectations: What exactly is it -- a medical thriller, a domestic drama, a murder mystery, a survivalist tale, a metaphysical fable?"
20/01/2010
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The Times
Chris Power
"Ferris is a fine writer and his talent shines fitfully through this novel’s heavy weather. But pleasure grows scarcer, and disappears completely as the book moves into its protracted final section... [Tim's] trek, and indeed the novel as a whole, is an allegory waiting to happen, and yet it sedulously manages to avoid becoming resonant."
13/02/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Robert Epstein
"…anyone expecting more of the same will be sorely disappointed: The Unnamed is more Cormac (McCarthy) than Coupland (Douglas): distressingly bleak rather than distastefully blithe; staccato-sentenced rather than sardonically satirical… Ferris's protagonists are little more than ciphers."
21/02/2010
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The New York Times
Janet Maslin
"Tim feels as if he’s gotten off several gerbil wheels: the wheels of work, of medical treatment and of suburban family life. But “The Unnamed” is a literal Ferris wheel for the reader, since it brings Tim through ups and downs so cyclical they make the book seem to be going nowhere... “You go on and on,” Mr. Ferris writes, trying to describe Tim’s weary feeling and certainly summarizing this novel’s."
13/01/2010
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The New York Times
Jay McInerney
"It’s as if Ferris turns his back on his own abundant gifts as a novelist of manners, his gift for dialogue and for close observation of the linguistic and visual codes of American tribes, and starts walking so fast that he can hardly take in the landscape, let alone the people. “The Unnamed” is a road novel with severe tunnel vision."
22/01/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Catherine Taylor
"The point Ferris seems to be trying to make in the novel – which unfortunately becomes as meandering as its protagonist’s relentless hikes and quasi-philosophical rantings – is not only the pathos and terror wrought by a psychotic condition, but an overriding fear of happiness and stability."
21/02/2010
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The Daily Mail
Harry Ritchie
"Implausible? Why, yes, but then this novel isn't really concerned with plausibility, happy to acknowledge that Tim's compulsive walking has no physical or mental cause or medical precedent. Or, let's be frank, point… There's a brief respite when Tim tries to get his old job back and the novel offers a little of the office politicking that featured so inventively in Ferris's prizewinning first novel, Then We Came To The End. But then Tim starts walking again, and the book stumbles and staggers on to its end."
23/02/2010
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