Joshua Ferris (The Unnamed; To Rise Again at a Decent Hour) specializes in comic but soulful novels about everymen up against dehumanizing forces: the workplace, illness, technology. In the ceaselessly funny-wistful A Calling for Charlie Barnes, the eponymous protagonist's formidable adversary turns out to be none other than himself.
Charlie Barnes, age 68, is a Chicago-area financial planner whose big ideas have always fizzled. He's not a bad guy, but he's a lifelong cutter of corners with a checkered employment history, a trail of ex-wives and a complicated relationship with the truth. Case in point: as the novel begins, Charlie has just told his family and friends that he has pancreatic cancer--he's so sure!--but when the test results come back negative, he feels sheepish about sharing the good news and wonders if maybe he doesn't have to.
As Charlie sets out to try to realize one last great idea, Ferris, a faultless crafter of sentences, imbues him with archetypically American never-say-uncle ambition in the face of grim odds: "Charlie's solution to this was to tinker, with headlamp and toolbox, in the workshop of the American dream, and to emerge sometime later with a diamond-cut hope that might make him a killing and redeem his lost time."
This is a riotous bildungsroman, its delivery system a hilariously unreliable narrator who has a vested interest in Charlie's fights, for success and for life. By the time the narrator says, "This book is about Charlie.... It's a testament to Charlie and my love for him," readers will long have had an eyebrow raised. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer