I am not sure whether I would have read To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by 
Joshua Ferris if it hadn’t made it to the long list of this year’s Man Booker prize. That is probably the greatest benefit of paying attention to literary line-ups of all hue – they lead you off in new directions. My failure to have previously zeroed in on this book or Ferris’s earlier novels, The Unnamed and Then We Came To An End, is a little strange seeing as both were very highly praised and Ferris was on the recent Top 40 Authors Under 40. Another list. Stephen King clearly acknowledges on the back cover how much he loved To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: “One hesitates to call it the Catch-22 of dentistry but it’s sort of in that ballpark”. However for the first third of the book it was like being stuck in a loop of endless Seinfeld re-runs. Sort of fun, but much ado about nothing.
In brief, Paul O’Rourke is a highly successful and wealthy New York dentist, rabid
devotee of the Red Sox (the baseball team not footwear), who has developed a bit of a habit of falling madly, passionately, many would say obsessively, in love with the families of his Jewish girlfriends. Then his website gets hi-jacked, or to be more accurate, someone creates a website but hijack’s O’Rourke’s life to star on it. Soon O’Rourke has a Facebook and Twitter account plus a new email address. Only he doesn’t. And his unwanted alter ego is spouting some pretty incendiary stuff