The Unnamed

The Unnamed is blurbed as a sort of middle-class malaise novel: “Tim Farnsworth is a handsome, healthy man, ageing with the grace of a matinée idol. He loves his work. He loves his family. He loves his kitchen. And then one day he stands up and walks out on all of it.” So far so Revolutionary Road, so ‘Poetry of Departures’. But the conceit in fact is a lot more interesting – and eccentric – than expected. In fact Tim (I can’t bear to call him Farnsworth, a name no Futurama fan can take seriously) keeps on walking because he literally cannot stop. He suffers from what we might call the paramilitary wing of Restless Legs Syndrome. Not only that, he has no control over where he walks, so his wife has become used to prepping him with flasks of tea and Kendal Mint Cake (or US equivalent), and picking him up from faraway highways and forests, when his body finally tires and he drops. No doctor has been able to diagnose his condition (the closest they get is the reflexive “benign idiopathic perambulation,” which doesn’t explain it so much as just describe it) and, not surprisingly, investigations have tended toward the psychiatric rather than the physical. Even his teenage daughter thinks “he’s mental.”