To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

'There's nothing like a dental chair to remind a man that he's alone in the world, subject to pain, blood, decay, and a slow attenuation back down to the elements.' Paul O'Rourke - dentist extraordinaire, reluctant New Yorker, avowed atheist, disaffected Red Sox fan, and a connoisseur of the afternoon mochaccino - is a man out of touch with modern life. While his thriving dental practice occupies his days, his insomniac nights are filled with speculation and regret, as he ponders his mistakes with his ex-girlfriend (and receptionist) Connie, questions all the rituals that give his life meaning, and alternately marvels at and rails against the optimism and ignorance of the rest of humanity. So it goes, until someone begins to impersonate Paul online. Deeply committed to an analog life, Paul watches in impotent horror as a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account are created in his name to promote a little-known ancient religion. And yet what began as an outrageous violation of privacy soon becomes something far more soul-frightening: the possibility that the virtual 'Paul' might be a better version of the man in the flesh. Suddenly, everything Paul believes, or doesn't, seems to be at stake...Joshua Ferris's dazzlingly inventive, brutally comic new novel cuts to the very heart of modern existence: the meaning of life, the certainty of death, and the importance of good oral hygiene.

About the Author :
Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He is the author of Then We Came to the End (2007), which was nominated for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the highly acclaimed The Unnamed. In 2010 he was selected for the New Yorker's prestigious '20 under 40' list. In 2014 To Rise Again at a Decent Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in upstate New York.

Review :
Funny, thought-provoking, and touching. One hesitates to call it the CATCH-22 of dentistry, but it's sort of in that ballpark. Some books simply carry you along on the strength and energy of the author's invention and unique view of the world. This is one of those books Smart, sad, hilarious and eloquent . . . a writer at the top of his game and surpassing the promise of his celebrated debut This is one of the funniest, saddest, sweetest novels I've read since Then We Came to the End. When historians try to understand our strange, contradictory era, they would be wise to consult To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. It captures what it is to be alive in early 21st-century America like nothing else I've read Very funny [and] highly entertaining . . . Josh Ferris is a gifted satirist and very much in touch with the fear and paranoia that undercut US society Joshua Ferris has proved his astonishing ability to spin gold from ordinary air . . . As brave and adept as any writer out there Geek-smart prose and wry humour . . . hilarious Genuine, funny, tragic and never dull. It'll also leave you flossing with a vengeance It's a pleasure watching this young writer confidently range from the registers of broad punchline comedy to genuine spiritual depth . . . There's a happy side effect to reading the novel, as well: If you're a backslider like I was, it will guilt you into flossing again An engrossing and hilariously bleak novel about a dentist being shook out of his comfortable atheism . . . This splintering of the self hasn't been performed in fiction so neatly since Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock' Ferris [is] a Virgil of the disaffected . . . This is the novel's peculiar brilliance, to uncover its existential stakes in the most mundane tasks Laugh-out-loud hilarious, combining Woody Allen's New York nihilism with an Ivy League vocabulary Returns Ferris to the comedy of the workplace . . . his writing is so fresh and modern - a comedian's sense of timing mixed with a social critic's knack for shaking the bushes Funny and surprisingly moving It is completely wonderful . . . Good god he is talented Enormously impressive: profoundly and humanely engaged with the mysteries of belief and disbelief . . . dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be Brilliant . . . witty . . . passages of flashing comedy that sound like a stand-up theologian suffering a nervous breakdown Joshua Ferris excels at mordantly comic novels about ordinary people in crisis . . . he writes with brio about the modern condition Compelling but never cheap, inventive but never obscure . . . Ferris has secured his status as exactly the sort of mainstream literary novelist American fiction needs A hoot . . . There's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a dash, too, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to US literary fiction Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel. If misanthropy's going to come from anywhere it's from a lifetime's confrontation with halitosis This is fierce, pithy, unforgiving satire, taking a sledgehammer to all-American cracker-barrel homeliness. Its comic energy is fuelled by disgust and exasperation, in the tradition of Roth and Heller and John Kennedy O'Toole. But Ferris is also a dab hand at more delicate humour, every bit as contemporary . . . Ferris is very funny . . . His voice is unique Joshua Ferris has been heralded as one of America's sharpest observers of 21st-century life and, reading his third novel, it's easy to see why. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has the immediacy and the trenchant satire of a brilliant stand-up routine as well as the big ideas and the in-depth research of a brilliant academic paper To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a funny novel, by turns ha-ha, peculiar and, like O'Rourke himself, suspended between heaven and earth