To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

To Rising Once again at a Decent Hour

past Joshua Ferris

Hardcover, 337 pages |

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To Rise Once more at a Decent Hour

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Joshua Ferris

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"Cynicism, skepticism, complaint, and outrage," New York dentist Paul O'Rourke explains to his devoutly religious hygienist. "That'due south why we were put on globe."

You won't notice that on a motivational affiche, of class, simply to be fair, O'Rourke — the world-weary protagonist of Joshua Ferris' third novel, To Rise Once more at a Decent 60 minutes — comes past his nihilism honestly. His dental practise is a success, but the remainder of his life is a shambles. His concluding romantic human relationship, with his young office manager, concluded desperately — as did all the ones before that — for reasons that were entirely his fault. He's spent his life wanting aught more than a Red Sox championship — his male parent, also a Sox diehard, committed suicide before historically unlucky Boston pulled it off in 2004.

Just even afterwards his beloved Sox interruption their 86-year-long championship drought, O'Rourke simply feels worse. What's left to hope for when you lot get the thing you lot want the most? "Everything was almost something," he muses, "simply something — and here was the rub — could never be everything."

O'Rourke's life gets fifty-fifty more complicated when he finds a website, a Facebook business relationship, and a Twitter feed, all under his proper name — created by an impostor with unclear motives. When he tracks down the people who have stolen his identity, he finds they claim to exist members of the Ulms, an ancient sect with roots in the Middle E. Why their sudden interest in an Irish gaelic-American dentist from New England? Because, they explicate, he's i of them, and they want him to learn about his heritage. O'Rourke is skeptical, only finds himself drawn into their world, obsessed, even as he doubts nearly everything they say.

The plot might sound unusual, but don't be fooled — it's at least twice as weird equally you lot call back, and countless times more entertaining. (Information technology'due south rare that you offset to like a volume before it fifty-fifty begins, but the novel is preceded by perhaps the funniest epigraph in recent American literature — no spoilers, but information technology's perfect and hilarious.)

The real fun begins with the text, of grade, and Ferris draws the reader in with the very first page. He'south one of the country'south funniest novelists, able to describe characters with succinct, hilarious turns of phrase — for case, O'Rourke's dental hygienist, Betsy Convoy, is "similar an unhappy docent. Y'all got the impression you were about to go on a boring tour of something edifying and that she would make it as castigating as possible."

The sense of humour flags a chip, necessarily, as the novel progresses and O'Rourke finds himself more frustrated, more obsessed with the sect that won't cease pursuing him. It hardly matters, though — O'Rourke is one of the most original characters you'll run across in fiction. He's a well-meaning wreck of a man, making earnest attempts to get people to like him, all of which backfire in darkly hilarious ways. He'south a man who's given upward, but somehow tin't give up trying.

And somehow, out of this deeply twisted comic novel, Ferris finds a stirring, deeply felt message about faith, though not necessarily a positive one. O'Rourke eventually learns that the Ulms are unique in at least one respect — they believe in a god who doesn't want to be worshipped. "God has instructed His people to doubt," explains one of them. It's a bulletin that appeals to O'Rourke, an atheist — a religion that requires you, essentially, not to believe in it.

Of form, there's more to it than that, and there's more to this novel than can exist described in one (or, frankly, many) reviews. Suffice it to say that To Rise Again at a Decent Hour isn't just one of the best novels of the twelvemonth, information technology's ane of the funniest, and most unexpectedly profound, works of fiction in a very long fourth dimension. Something tin never be anything, equally O'Rourke notes, only Ferris' triumphant book is everything yous could want from a novel of faith and its contrary — whatever that may be.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2014/06/26/325529167/a-dentist-confronts-the-gaping-maw-of-life-in-to-rise-again