After reading absolutely glowing reviews of The Unnamed
The Unnamed is the story of Tim Farnsworth, a workaholic lawyer, married to Jane and father to teenager Becka. They live a privileged life in a big beautiful home in the suburbs and Tim is hard at work on a high profile murder case. But Tim has a mysterious disorder, which has just resurfaced, that makes him walk for hours at a time until he is physically exhausted. He literally will walk out of the house and end up miles away, only to wake up behind a dumpster of a gas station, or on the frozen ground in a field. His loyal wife Jane helps Tim any way she can and has in the past gone to extremes (like when she handcuffed him to their bed to keep him from walking). Tim is desperate to prove to himself that this disorder is physical, not mental, and has gone through numerous tests to prove just that. This walking disorder disrupts everything in Tim’s life, including his work and in particular his marriage to Jane.
The Unnamed is a well written book, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s at all lyrical or poetic. There were no beautiful passages that I just had to re-read or felt the need to quote in this review. What The Unnamed has is a wholly original story that Mr. Ferris has written. The story here isn’t really about Tim’s unnamed disorder, but what an uncontrollable sickness can do to a family and a marriage. The story is what made the first half of the book fly by for me. It captured my imagination and I couldn’t put the book down. Unfortunately, the latter half of the book kind of fell apart for me. The internal struggle that the author writes about after another recurrence of his walking disorder dragged on and I found myself wanting to speed things up to find out what really was going on. Unfortunately, there was no real satisfying resolution at the end of the book, plus there were plot threads that the author focuses on that are never resolved or even brought up again. I was not at all surprised when doing some research on book reviews for The Unnamed, I read this in Thom Geier’s review at Entertainment Weekly:
It doesn’t help that Ferris’ narrative attention tends to drift as far afield as his hero does. The author dwells on certain peripheral plot points — the murder trial, Tim’s status at the firm, the sudden and unexplained death of bees — only to drop them just as abruptly as Tim does his sanity (or, more alarmingly, his frostbitten toes).
This isn’t to say there weren’t merits to The Unnamed. The focus on the marriage of Tim and Jane were really interesting and Ferris has a real grasp of what it might be like for a relationship to try and survive a debilitating condition. In the end, even though I felt The Unnamed had lots of potential and started off with a bang, it petered out for me. For a similar point of view about The Unnamed, check out this review at Seize the Book.
* Please note that the open letter I wrote to the author, which I posted last week, had no bearing on my review of The Unnamed. In fact, when I wrote that post I was only 40 or so pages into the book and mention how much I was enjoying it.
As you said this book has gotten great buzz but when I look at the reviews on Amazon.com it’s not that highly rated. So I think all in all, I’ll pass.
Julie, I haven’t read the Amazon reviews, but know a bunch of blogger are crazy about this book. As I said, it started off strong but just couldn’t keep up the pace.
No book is for everyone and I’m really glad I read your review because I just lowered my expectations some.
I hope you like this one a lot better than I did Kathy!
Stephanie, are you participating in the Reagan Arthur reading challenge? This is one of their books. (Sorry if you’ve already mentioned that elsewhere.)
No, I’m not, but thanks for letting me know about it!
I just wrote my review for this yesterday, and I have to say, I felt similarly conflicted over The Unnamed. I loved that it was original (there is no book that I could possibly think of to compare it to), but sometimes I felt like the author was a bit crazy himself. I actually said to my husband as I was reading it, “Maybe it’s the hype that has me turned off to this one, but I’m not feeling it like I hoped I would.” Maybe I missed the connection to the passages where he looks to God or faith. (like when he is in the church, and thinks he is hallucinating – IS he hallucinating?) Maybe I’m just a cold shell of a person.
Yes, join the Reagan Arthur reading challenge!
http://rabookschallenge.wordpress.com/
Actually, the premise of The Unnamed reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books, The Time Traveler’s Wife, although I didn’t mention that in my review.
I think that the author was trying to show the mental breakdown of Tim in his last long walk, when he was talking to himself and that maybe the church scene was a hallucination (or maybe it wasn’t)
I’ve seen tons of glowing reviews of this one, and I keep forgetting to add it to my library list! I’m off to do that now.
It took me about a month to read this book so not one that I was flying through. I thought it was good but not the best of the year for me by any means.
I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it too much.
It’s definitely true that no book is for everyone but this book really affected me.
This one didn’t appeal to me when I first read about it. But then Trish was so enthusiastic, I felt like maybe I should pick it up. Thanks for giving me permission to skip over it!
I finally got a chance to pop in and read your review. I think I’m on the fence about this one. There are so many books that are calling to me, and you and I tend to enjoy similar books, so… I may sit this one out. Thanks for the honest assessment, Steph.
BTW, I love your header. The girls are so cute with their books!