Unnamed' is focused tale of a man undone

His debut, "Then We Came to the End,” was a dark ensemble comedy similar to "The Office” television series. "The Unnamed” is a tightly focused tale of one man coming undone.

The book opens in disorientation. Tim Farnsworth is returning from work in the dead of winter. He’s dropped his cell phone in the street, but for some unexplained reason, he cannot go back to get it.

He tells himself that he’s going to lose his house and everything in it, that he’s going to lose his family and that this has happened before. Was he fired? Is he dying? He mentions a recurrence, but of what exactly?

When Tim returns to his suburban New York home, he tells his wife, Jane: "It’s back,” and she dutifully prepares him as if for an Arctic voyage. Hours later, she’s picking him up out of the snow.

Tim suffers from an unnamed disorder that swoops down without warning and sends him walking compulsively for miles and miles until he collapses, fast asleep. When he wakes up, he phones home and his wife goes and finds him.

It’s a familiar routine for the Farnsworth family, though the symptoms had been in remission of late — having left as mysteriously as they came.

He’s already seen all the doctors and specialists, but it’s still an open question whether the problem is medical or psychological. So Tim resigns himself to working his life around these sudden compulsive walks to nowhere until it inevitably wreaks havoc with his job as a partner at a prestigious New York law firm.

A final attempt to try to prove there’s a medical cause for his problem — requiring that he wear a neuro-monitoring bicycle helmet around the clock — provides the book with a healthy dose of black humor. It also drives the final coffin nail into his career.

Many of the law office scenes ring false, which is a surprise considering the dead-on depiction of ad agency life in Ferris’ earlier novel.

"The Unnamed” is particularly good, though, at depicting the toll of illness and disability on loved ones, and Ferris manages to pull off the rare literary feat of portraying a convincing, unembellished portrait of true love between Tim and his wife.

When Jane stops coming for him, though, Tim becomes completely unbound and eventually resigns himself to endless wandering.

In his wandering, he is blessed by a seemingly endless bank account amassed over years as a law partner — not an inconsequential detail. It’s the difference between eccentric and deranged, but it doesn’t help if the author’s intent is to use Tim’s unnamed affliction as a larger metaphor for what’s ailing society.

These are minor quibbles, however, compared with what Ferris pulls off.

"The Unnamed” is a book that draws the reader along as compulsively as its main character is propelled on his endless walks.

And the book ends with a singular achievement — a convincing depiction of what it might be like to die from the dying man’s point of view.