Discussed in this essay:

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, by Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown. 352 pages. $26.

Among the many impressive things about Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris’s first novel, was the coolly assured way it matched form to content. Most debuts (most novels, in fact) fumble uncertainly toward the right method for displaying their particular goods, but Ferris seemed to know in advance exactly how to tell his bittersweet tale of life and death in a Chicago advertising office. An epigraph from Emerson, stating that the worst thing that…