Imagine: Chicago, a successful advertising agency, you are walking down the corridor, and a smiling employee meets you with a hole neatly cut out of his T-shirt. You walk further, and suddenly someone in a clown costume shoots you in the heart with a pistol. For fun, of course, not with bullets, but with paintballs, but he didn’t warn you about that. This is the situation in this novel. In general, it is understandable - in order not to completely go crazy among the standard glass cages of a modern American factory for the production of advertising valuables, you either need to be a psycho from the very beginning, or skillfully pretend to be so. This is what the wonderful novel by the young American Joshua Ferris tells about, which another American, the well-known Stephen King, compared to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” in terms of the absurdity of the situations, and he was absolutely right.