To Rise Again At A Decent Hour

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour  –  a novel by Joshua Ferris

In his first novel, Then We Came To The End (2007),  Joshua Ferris brought us into the office life of a Manhattan ad agency. Employing a first person plural narrator he showed how intimate daily contact around shared purpose leads to a shared culture and viewpoint. The conceit was effective, as far as  it went, but it’s hard as an individual reader to fully embrace a group as a single entity, to be inhabited and cherished in the same way we might Huck Finn or Captain Ahab. Corporations, after all, aren’t really people.

Thankfully, Ferris has retreated to the first person singular in his third book, To Rise Again At A Decent Hour (TRAAADH). Set in present day Manhattan, TRAAADH incorporates the internet in all its global hard- and soft-ware. Beginning with the mundane world of a dental office, Ferris slowly weaves his way from the quotidian to the infinite, without ever losing the focus on his central character, Paul O’Rourke, DDS.

O’Rourke, an only child, lost his father to suicide, and has been fearing and seeking intimacy ever since. His first girlfriend, at age 13, is attractive mainly for her self-confident father. In college, his next love, Samantha Santacroce, brings with her a sprawling yet organized Catholic family, devoted to order and tradition. He loves them all too well, and is booted out of their embrace, landing a few years later with Connie Plotz. She is surrounded by an even larger Jewish clan, complete with endless arguments, observant atheists, and holocaust survivors. As we first meet Paul, he has just begun to realise that Connie, and thus the cocoon of the Plotzes, is also lost to him.

But certainly not forgotten. His dental office consists of himself, Abby (his moody assistant), Betty Convoy (a devout Catholic and extraordinarily skilled hygienist), and Connie, who remains as his office manager. Among them, he can constantly be reminded of his longing for the warmth that family and religion can provide, and also the constant doubt he carries about them, complete with a morbid atheism.

His time is spent devoted to his patients and their smiles, along with his Boston Red Sox obsession. He has been video taping all of their games since the early 80’s, saving and cataloguing each tape; he has purchased several VHS recorders from remainder sales, so that he will always be able to watch them, should he ever choose. His social life seems to consist of visits to multiple online fan sites, where he chats with other members of the Red Sox nation. In the office, he can follow all this on his smart phone (“me-machine”.)

This stable, sterile life is interrupted one day when Connie shows him a web site for their office. Paul has not authorized this; no one knows where it is coming from. Gradually this twist on identity theft morphs into an email address, a Facebook page and a Twitter account, all from “Paul C. O’Rourke, DDS”. The middle initial is a scary clue; O’Rourke has never used his middle name, and it doesn’t not appear on any official documents such as driver’s license or diploma. Whoever is creating a cyber life for him knows him more intimately than even Connie.

Through some elementary sleuthing, Paul connects with the source of the intrusion, which leads into a modern day lost tribe of Israel, the Amalekites, or Ulm, who are claiming (or not) Paul as one of their own.

Ferris continually circles around two central themes. He ponders the mystery of love, how it can attach itself and warp everything around it. Ferris refers to this as being “cunt-gripped”, or, more elegantly, becoming deranged – if only for a short time.

And he pursues the central question of all religions, who or what is behind all this. He uses the large Catholic and Jewish families to pivot among their various approaches to this question, and then blows a hole into it all with the Ulm philosophy. Apparently, around the time of the burning bush, God also appeared to Agag, the first (and last) king of the Amalekites. God revealed himself, and asked that they keep a covenant with him: they must continually doubt his existence. A bit tough to do when the Almighty has just revealed himself to you, but what better way to spend one’s life – doubt, not rejection, in the face of the faith swirling all around us.

Despite its heady themes, TRAAADH is a breezy, welcoming read. Paul is an everyman for the modern age, embracing and yet confused by the technology infusing his existence. His quest is personal – just like an iPhone – and yet it is universal, as broad in  space and time as the World Wide Web. Or, as the hygienist Betty Convoy tells Dr. O’Rourke:

“ ‘Sending and receiving email and texts are not a new form of prayer. Do you not understand that that little machine, by taking your attention away from God and the world He created, is only increasing your despair?’ I’d tell her, she’d say, ‘I don’t give a fig for the world it’s created, it will never rival God’s’ “