I think I have a book crush on Joshua Ferris (or "Josh" as I call him when I talk back to his narration). I super liked [b:And Then We Came to the End|2025667|Then We Came to the End|Joshua Ferris|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1210008278s/2025667.jpg|2926759] and listening to The Unnamed, I felt hypnotized by the soft rhythms of his voice. Oh, Josh. Your new book is so sad. Are you, okay?

Here's the plot: Tim Farnsworth and his wife Jane are happily married, well off, etc. But they are dealing with a strange unnamed affliction. Tim has this problem where he just starts walking and he can't stop. He can't control where he's walking or how long he walks. He doesn't know when the walks will start or stop. He just get carried away by his legs and there's nothing he can do to stop it.

To me, this almost sounds like a funny premise. It has slapstick potential, right? But in my dear Josh's hands it is tragic. It adds stress to Tim and Jane's life the way that a terminal illness would, only Tim can't get the automatic sympathy a named illness would grant.

There is a really interesting look at the mind/body dichotomy in this book because Tim can't control his body and it's ruining his life. So he has a kind of psychotic break where he feels like he's two people: his mind that wants to stay put and his body that demands he walk.

Ultimately, it's Josh's writing that I love. The man has a gift for unpretentious, moving prose. This book is crushingly sad, but not in a way that made me angry or depressed. Instead I felt grateful that I don't have a disease, especially a strange unnamed walking one. ( )

I really enjoyed parts of this book - and I think I understand what he was trying to do towards the end, but it became tedious and boring in parts. I've found this with Joshua Ferris in the past though, he starts well and I'm hugely intrigued, but he takes too long to deliver and my brain stops being interested.
That being said I thought all the characters were well written and interesting, it reminded me quite a lot of Joe Meno's The Great Unknown in style and content. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2010 about this read: "Wow, who could imagine a life like that!? Comfortable couple copes with an life-altering condition that sends the man walking. The man becomes at war with himself, he and the marriage survives somehow. Very stimulating, different-to-read, hard-to-put down novel." ( )

Lived up to expectations. About a bigwig lawyer who suddenly gets the urge to walk, and when I say walk he walks for like hundreds of miles at a time non stop. Oh your kids graduating tonight, sorry i'm walking , I can't . It's that bad, it's tie him down at nighttime bad. Overall a great read, treat yourself. ( )

It was very well written and even moving in parts, but that couldn't distract me from the fact that it had little to no plot development. I felt like it was all a series of depressingly absurd incidents in a man's life that never led to a climax. I can handle depressing, but it's kind of cheating a reader to write a depressing novel that doesn't really go anywhere or impart any memorable message. Ferris' previous work, Then We Came to the End, is a much better and more dynamic novel. ( )