Mankind has long struggled with corporeality. Where does the soul reside? Are mind and body separate entities? I think, therefore I am?Joshua Ferris only sort of addresses these questions in his grotesque second novel, The Unnamed, which came out at the end of January. The book, which follows a rich New York lawyer afflicted with an incurable, involuntary compulsion to walk in any direction until passing out from exhaustion, seems to be stuck on one brutal theme: It sucks that our bodies are fallible.

Anyone looking for something akin to Ferris' debut novel, a hilarious and poignant look at office life set in an advertising agency going through seemingly endless layoffs, should make a detour for one of this year's other "it" books. The novel, beginning in a realist mode in suburban Connecticut and ending in a chaotic, self-destructive narrative pile in some indeterminate American location, is a hellish slog through attorney Tim Farnsworth's physical and mental decline. With remorseless logic, Ferris follows Farnsworth through years of unexplained walking across the United States and back as Farnsworth loses appendages to frostbite, is preyed upon by criminals and becomes dependent on psychiatric drugs after his torturous journey away from his comfortable life and into an abyss where he begins to argue senselessly with the voice of his physical person.

One might expect that such a fall from grace would allow Farnsworth to make astute observations of American society and human relationships. Not really. He suffers a few awkward interactions with the good-hearted working-class doorman at his law firm; he has some "deep" thoughts about race relations. Farnsworth's stereotypical inert guilt at being a rich white person is so bland that I thought perhaps it was intended as a somewhat ironic effort by the author to portray his characters in an objective light, like Emile Zola's warts-and-all portrayals of characters in his social-commentary novels. I'm not really sure, except that Farnsworth's and his wife's vague musings on race are too pointed to be simply character development but not cultivated into any kind of theme or lesson.

All of this criticism doesn't mention the excruciating experience of actually reading Farnsworth's devastating battle with himself. Some books are difficult to read, and that's the point-it wouldn't necessarily be appropriate to sanitize a realistic portrayal of the horrors of war, for example. However, there doesn't seem to be any payoff in The Unnamed. Farnsworth's disease, which is allegorical (but to what I can't entirely figure out), is completely unexplained, and yet the book lacks a sense of mystery or absurdity appropriate to modern life. Following the innocent yet unlikeable Farnsworth through the living hell of the last several years (presumably-the narrative breaks down halfway through the novel) of his life feels like a punishment, not a catharsis.

The social commentary and character development that made Ferris' debut, Then We Came to the End, so great are utterly missing here. That's partly because with such a plot (and a main character who can't interact with others for more than a few second at a time), society hardly comes into play. I'm afraid of what's to come from Joshua Ferris: if he doesn't get his characters back into the office, who knows what we might be reading next?