If you liked Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed...
...why not try the two tomes with similar themes?
White Noise by Don Delillo
Jack Gladney, head of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, is afraid of death, as is his colleague Murray who runs a seminar on car crashes, and Gladney’s (fifth) wife Babette, who tries to combat her fear with a fictional drug. The author exposes our common obsession with mortality and chemical ‘cures’, and Jack and Babette's biggest fear - who will die first?
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
McCarthy’s narrator – the victim of a previous, un-discussed trauma – rebuilds his life and, as glimpses of memory emerge, he hires actors to re-enact events, however insignificant, to identify his reality.
Traumatised by an accident which 'involved something falling from the sky' and leaves him eight and a half million pounds richer but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, Remainder's hero spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past: a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off them...But when this fails to quench his thirst for authenticity, he starts reconstructing more and more violent events, including holdups and shoot-outs. A darkly comic meditation on memory, identity and history.
