It is not easy being a dentist, day after day dealing with terrified patients, some of whom are desperate for help, others who dispute the numbers of horrors lurking in their mouths, and yet more who are manifesting complete denial.
Paul O’Rourke, operating from his smart practice on Park Avenue, “the most civilised street in the world” and the one part of New York that has sustained its period charm, has seen it all, humankind at the mercy of teeth and gums targeted by bacteria and doomed by neglect.
O’Rourke is successful, if overwhelmed by the wealth he has amassed by working more hours than could be expected. Yet he is unhappy; his romance with his lovely employee, Connie, a poet who also manages the office, is finally over, possibly due to her constantly googling facts on her phone. The dentist does not believe in God, has trouble sleeping and spends his days performing dental miracles while lecturing his patients about flossing. “Flossing prevents periodontal disease and can extend life up to seven years. It’s also time-consuming and a general pain in the ass.”
O’Rourke’s misery is heartfelt but also very funny.
Joshua Ferris, who was born in Illinois, became famous with his dazzling first novel, Then We Came to the End (2007), about the death throes of a Chicago office, then followed it with The Unnamed (2010). To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is his third novel, and although it is not quite as original, and owes an obvious debt to Philip Roth's Operation Shylock (1993), it is very funny, sustained by authentic dialogue and comic set pieces inspired by the internet. It has probably already attracted the attention of a film-maker keen for a sharp script.
Ferris does take a big and unnecessary risk in the repeated use of a euphemism for being in sexual thrall to someone, which is not only offensive but also completely out of character for the dentist, who is otherwise a likeable social outcast with multiple issues. Aside from teeth, which have become his life’s work thanks to his early obsession with a young girl, his first romance, O’Rourke endures a life-sapping passion for the Boston Red Sox. Baseball has always been there for him, long after his interest in golf and the gym failed him.
He is a loner, facing 40 and incapable even of having a pet dog, as he is grimly aware that it too will die. Much of the humour rests in O’Rourke having little fun in his life. His accounts of his obsessive love for the few women he courted and their respective flights are amusing; he recalls how, on his visit to Europe with Connie, “We must have seen eight to nine hundred churches during our twelve days!”
O'Rourke exists within an office manned by his all-knowing veteran hygienist, Betsy Convoy, a robust widow, and by Connie, who keeps the office tidy and orders fresh flowers. Also present, in a shadowy sort of way, is Abby, the dental assistant, who rarely if ever speaks, and never directly to O'Rourke.
All is going relatively well, and O’Rourke has realised that there is nothing left for him to buy; all he can do is visit shopping malls in order to watch other people shop, purchase and consume.
Life for him appears to have come to a standstill, enlivened only by monitoring the progress of the Red Sox until the morning Mrs Convoy congratulates O’Rourke on having set up a website for the practice. He knows nothing about it – and the story really begins.
Although O’Rourke is a good talker and has plenty of memories to share, the narrative is largely driven by the dialogue of a small group of characters, the staff of the practice, intent on discovering the source of the website. Much of the material is personal and related to O’Rourke, so Connie believes that he has set it up. But no. O’Rourke becomes increasingly alarmed as the website takes to issuing heated comments about Judaism and the Amalekites, a tribe referred to in the Bible as the enemy of the Israelites.
O'Rourke begins to take action but soon discovers he is conducting an internet conversation with himself. It is funny and also derivative; the exasperated tone of O'Rourke's lengthy monologues is reminiscent of the great William Gaddis in full flow, while Roth's pursuit of an impostor intent on leading the Jews out of Israel and back to Europe is instead here reversed into a search for self. O'Rourke's quest is also shaped by that of Binx Bolling in Walker Percy's majestic The Moviegoer (1960).
Ferris is a gifted satirist and very much in touch with the fear and paranoia that undercut US society. His approach to the theme is far more light-hearted than that of Don DeLillo, yet it is similar. It would be very easy to dismiss the story as a comedy that is pushed to its limits but for Ferris ensuring that O’Rourke, for all his irritating mannerisms and utter selfishness, is actually a tragic character. The son of a depressed father, another baseball fan, who had without warning killed himself in the bath one night, causing his son to find him, O’Rourke grew up never being able to sleep and was haunted by being the only person in the world left awake.
In adulthood he becomes a man determined to marry a Jewish girl because she comes from a large family with at least 400 relatives, whereas he only has two, one of them dead. It is often while the reader is laughing the loudest at this deceptively serious novel that it becomes clear exactly how tragic it is. O’Rourke later visits the stricken mother who once looked after him so well, as she sits in a nursing home, unaware that he is there, beside her, asking questions.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is about far more than getting up in the morning: it is about trying to live. The ongoing gags about the internet and social media, Jewish history and stolen identity, and all the banter, are jointly leading to a very predictable conclusion about finding oneself, or at least an acceptable version of that self. Ferris, with his proven deft touch, makes it all highly entertaining, if slightly sobering, in a good novel about loneliness that could well become an even better movie.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
