Illustration for 'To Rise at a Decent Hour' book review
© Tom Clohosy Cole

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, by Joshua Ferris, Viking, RRP£16.99/Little, Brown, RRP$26, 352 pages

You have to say this for Joshua Ferris as a comic novelist: he's not agape to tackle the big stuff. To Rise Over again at a Decent 60 minutes is a book near midlife crunch, the experience of religious conversion, the struggle to find meaning in everyday life, the yearning for human connexion, the awful lure of suicide and the appalling terror of death. It'southward a hoot. Also, it has some important, timely and extremely well-researched things to say most dentistry. Flossing, manifestly, makes all the difference.

Ferris's narrator, Paul O'Rourke, is a New York dentist with a flourishing practice on Park Avenue. He works hard, makes "tons and tons of coin", and is a consummate mess emotionally. Peradventure because of his trade – "a dentist is only half the physician he claims to exist. That he's also half mortician is the secret he keeps to himself" – Paul is encumbered with a vivid sense of the skull below the skin. He is not at home in the world.

How should he spend his days? "Everything was always something but something – and hither was the rub – could never exist everything." He tries to lose himself at different times in golf, in playing the banjo, in streaming movies to his Idiot box. He measures out his life in afternoon mochaccinos. He has a love/hate relationship with smartphones and iPads, aka "me-machines". Obsessive rituals govern his weekly communion with the Boston Blood-red Sox. This, it becomes clear, is bound upward with his feelings for his late male parent (too a fanatical Sox fan) who was bipolar and committed suicide.

We become poignant, strange glimpses of Paul's early life – his male parent's "tendency to bring dwelling house all the irons for auction at the Sears and then stand up over the sink and cry while my mom returned them"; "he'd start to redo the bathroom grout or lay new linoleum in the kitchen with whatever other man's new-project gusto, and when it was exactly i-tertiary complete he'd go out, bulldoze some distance, sell the automobile for some depression figure, and walk home and mitt the money to my female parent, weeping."

Paul is in love with his receptionist, Connie, with whom he conducted an unsuccessful relationship that has since concluded, in large part over his terror of bringing children into the earth. When Paul is in dearest he relinquishes all sense of self in his infatuation. He falls in dear not merely with the women in question but with their families. He longs to vest to these families – and develops, by extension, a complicated and nearly obsessive relationship with the communities of faith to which they belong. The first large dear was Catholic; the second, Jewish. He offended the family of the starting time by proclaiming his atheism; the second, past a gauche philosemitism.

The engine of the plot touches in oblique ways on all of these preoccupations. Out of the blue, Paul finds out that someone has set up up a adequately professional person-looking website for his dental practice. He is alarmed and enraged. He wants it taken down. Then someone starts a Twitter account, ostensibly in his proper noun, and someone purporting to be him starts making edits on Wikipedia.

This someone, it emerges, is preoccupied by biblical apocrypha. Quotations from cockeyed scriptures start to proliferate, telling the story of the descendants of a benighted Old Testament tribe called the Amalekites who struck a slightly different deal with God. They were commanded non to believe in God, but to doubtfulness Him; and their descendants, the "Ulms" were scattered invisibly across the globe.

Ferris has a lot of fun with the scripture: "One gets the impression, from later cantonments, that the group Safek – formerly Agag, king of the Amalekites – finally manages to gin upwardly with his message of dubiety consists of misfits, rejects, ex-slaves, heretics, whores, knuckledraggers from the Neolithic, and a few of your more comely lepers, all atop dehydrated camels and traipsing across the Bible's inhospitable terrain. The weird affair is, nobody bothers them."

It isn't clear, at get-go, whether this is the Fight Club-style story of a fractured personality – that Paul, finer, is impersonating himself – or something stranger. The answer, at the adventure of being accused of including spoilers, is: something stranger. Enter a melancholy billionaire with a taste for inexpensive lunch, an eccentric dental patient, an antiquarian book dealer, a shadowy cult leader, Connie'south shrewd old uncle and a whole lot of metaphysical pratfalls.

In that location's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a nuance, also, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to U.s.a. literary fiction.

The plot is ramshackle and (you suspect) incompletely thought through. Yet the comic exuberance of the writing and the compelling awfulness of Paul's neuroses just nearly bring y'all through. Here is something that – mostly successfully – marries a serious inquiry into the condition of a human soul with the wan recognition that, likewise equally having souls, we stride on banana skins. It drops, as was one time said of Stevie Smith, the stone of bathos through the waters of desolation. This is Paul writing an impassioned email to his tormentor: " 'I will not be contained by my news feeds and online purchases, by your complicated algorithms for simplifying a man. Lookout me interruption out of the hole you put me in. I am a man, not an animal in a buffet.'

Goddamn auto correct. I wrote back immediately.

'I meant 'cage'.' "

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