Reprinted from NPR: Tim Farnsworth, the main character in The Unnamed, the new novel from Joshua Ferris, is a partner in a high-powered law firm in Manhattan. He is married with a young daughter. And he cannot stop walking. According to Ferris, Tim's condition "is more of a disease than a compulsion."
"It's not really a feeling he has to walk, but really his body overtaking him and forcing him to walk," Ferris tells Melissa Block. Ferris' book delves into the question of whether Tim's condition is psychological or physical. But ultimately, the author says, "it concludes more or less that this is something he's simply not in control of."
He certainly can't control when he is struck by a need to start walking. One of the early episodes comes in the evening, when Tim is taking out the garbage, dressed for bed:
He walked past neighbors' houses, he walked barefoot down Route 22. He walked past the supermarket: empty parking lot and an eerie glow. He walked past the Korean Baptist church and the Saks-anchored mall into the dreams of late-night drivers who took home the image of some addled derelict in a cotton robe menacing the soft shoulder. He looked down at his legs. It was like watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the walker. That was the helplessness, this was the terror: the brakes are gone, the steering wheel has locked. I am at the mercy of this wayward machine.
The Unnamed
By Joshua Ferris
Hardcover, 320 pages
Reagan Arthur Books
List price: $24.99
Tim seeks out all sorts of medical remedies for his condition, from submitting to tests at the Mayo Clinic to taking bat-wing extract. But nothing can be determined.
"It's unnamed, it's undiagnosable, it's essentially uncurable," Ferris says. "It's recurring and remitting, so he has long stretches of time in which he's not afflicted, and over the course of the book, you see one of these sections and understand one of the ways Tim and, I think, sick people in general, re-embrace life and recognize that which has been taken away from them when their sickness hits."
But the effects of the sickness are brutal. Often, Tim's episodes hit during cold weather, and to keep him from wandering off, never to be found, his wife prepares a survival backpack, complete with a GPS device and energy bars.
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