Review: Joshua Ferris' 'Unnamed' examines frailties and the strength of personal relationships

Joshua Ferris' latest novel takes on the mystery and heartbreak of disease: the way it arrives unexpectedly, ravages the body, scares the hell out of the patient, upends family relationships and generally wreaks havoc. It's an innate part of the human experience, yet is paradoxically alien and disturbing. In The Unnamed, the patient is Tim Farnsworth, a successful New York lawyer living in the glitzy suburbs with his attractive wife, Jane, and sulky teenage daughter, Becka.

Tim is facing the third recurrence of a strange illness that doctors have been unable to diagnose; they're not even sure if it's physical or psychological. Tim is subject to episodes of compulsive walking: He must stop whatever he's doing and walk — across the city, across property lines, across state lines — until he collapses in exhaustion. Jane is his one-person support team, equipping him with a survival knapsack and GPS, picking him up whenever he stops walking. Her sacrifices — including attention to her career and daughter — have taken their toll, disguised by the all-consuming goal of keeping Tim alive and hiding his condition.

As the novel opens, Tim's secret is about to come out, so he decides that it's time to go off on his own to cope. This unraveling is the central plot of The Unnamed. (A subplot with a legal client is confusing and doesn't go anywhere.)

Not that Tim's condition is meant to be taken literally. In some ways, the novel suggests an acutely dreamy parable.

Ferris' distinctive writing style is serious but whimsical, philosophical with a touch of the absurd. His first novel, Then We Came to the End, told of layoffs at an advertising agency almost entirely in the first-person plural. ("We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. . . .") It was a funny, sophisticated take on the office, wickedly exposing its power and banality. The Unnamed, on the other hand, is a bleaker novel on a smaller scale, revolving around human relationships and frailties.

Angie Drobnic Holan is on the staff of PolitiFact.