Wincing over the water cooler

FictionJoshua Ferris's glittering debut novel is a brilliant, tragicomic view of office life with a sharply satirical sideswipe at the corporate world and the advertising industry.

The action takes place in a swanky advertising agency in Chicago just as the dot-com bubble has burst. The days when the advertising art directors and copywriters pushed each other down the hall "really fast in a swivel chair" and when there were flowers and sweets in reception are fast coming to a close, and the lay-offs have begun.

The thing that's bugging them is the lack of control: they simply don't know who is next - and these are people who pride themselves on always knowing what's going on, from their ultra-private boss Lynn's breast cancer to Amber's pregnancy by another colleague. "We knew everything," the narrator repeats several times: nothing is above being cruelly and dispassionately dissected around the water cooler.

Ferris (33), who worked in advertising in his native US, nails the smug sense of mover-and-shaker power. "We," he says "are the people who informed you in six seconds that you needed something you didn't know you lacked. We made you want anything that anyone willing to pay us wanted you to want." The novel, with the exception of the final chapter, which takes place five years later, is distinctively narrated in the first-person plural.

All events are filtered through the collective, judgmental eyes of the rapidly diminishing "we", which turns out be a distinctive collection of individuals.

They are a recognisable crew to any office worker, including Marcia Dwyer, whose hair was "stuck in the eighties"; boss Lynn Mason who "dressed like a Bloomingdales model and ate like a Buddhist monk"; and super-networker Karen Woo, for whom "it was vital that she be the first to know of a new restaurant".

IS THERE AN office drone - particularly anyone working in a media-related field - who hasn't sat with gritted teeth beside my favourite character, copywriter Don Blattner? He's a wannabe scriptwriter, who refers to Robert De Niro as "Bobby", studies the weekend box-office takings in Variety and mutters things such as "The boys at Miramax are going to be awfully disappointed about this". Ferris is wincingly good on office details, from the "particleboard wrapped in a cheap orange or beige fiber" between cubicles, to the desks covered in obsessively chosen coffee mugs, mousepads and "photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift . . . cloying reminders of time served." When Tom Mota is fired, the rest descend on his office, fighting over his ergonomic chair like children in a playground - a clever gag that runs through the novel, although when a clown-suited Mota later comes back toting a gun it seems a forced piece of absurdism.

THE FEARED BOSS Lynn Mason and her apparent denial of her diagnoses of breast cancer is a truly tragic and meaty subplot. At one point she briefs her increasingly jittery team to work on an advertising campaign to "make cancer funny". The various levels of powerlessness are revealed. The office culture of "we", the people who can make each other's lives either a living hell or a lot of fun between the hours of nine and five ultimately have no power because there's always a Lynn with the ability to stick her head around the cubicle and hand out a P45. And then there's Lynn herself, who is regarded as superhuman by her staff but who succumbs to breast cancer - something her award-winning creatives are unable to make even remotely funny.

A consistently entertaining and supremely confident first novel.

Bernice Harrison , a one-time advertising copy writer, is an Irish Times journalist

Then We Came to an End by Joshua Ferris Penguin Viking, 385pp. £14.99