The dude writing a screenplay who insists on referring to “Bobby De Niro.” The colleague too cheap to tip the waitress, forcing everyone else to cover his share at lunch. The illicit couple, copulating after hours, “on desks we hope to god were not ours.”

We in the office world know these people. We work with them. But Joshua Ferris, in his virtuoso first novel, makes us see them.

He writes in a conspiratorial tone of such delicious knowingness that I read “Then We Came to the End” with a great grin on my face. By turns hip, wicked and incisive, the novel plumbs the nuances of office humiliation, soaring entitlement, goofy pranks, busy-making maneuvers, low-grade venality and ever-present schadenfreude.

How I wish Karl Marx was alive to absorb this report from the workaday cubicle, set in a Chicago advertising firm in the 1990s just as the dot-com bubble bursts. How stunned the great theorist would be at what has become of his dialectic of class struggle.

“Unemployed, we would be unpaid; unpaid, we’d be evicted, from our homes; evicted we would end up on Lower Wacker, sharing space with shopping carts and developing our own winterized and blackened feet,” our unnamed narrator obsesses.

“We didn’t really believe we would be honked at from the Lexuses of our former colleagues as they drove down Lower Wacker on their way home to the suburbs. We didn’t think we would be forced to wave at them from our lit oil drums.”

Notice that Ferris, 32, a veteran of a Chicago ad agency and the master of fine arts program at the University of California, Irvine, writes more enjoyably than Marx. His novel reads like a dispatch about an exotic tribe evolved out to the edge of absurdity. His is a decidedly indoor book, flooded with “purgatorial” office light, set among dusty, fake plants, bad art and “pictures in cheap frames of our fat parents on vacation.”

The employees in this agency aren’t friends, aren’t family, aren’t really likable, in fact, “those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled.” And yet, as the novel progresses, the types deepen into characters, and the characters become capable of surprising us. As the firings multiply and the tension heightens, foundering colleagues begin to show signs of community. A few visit the boss in the hospital, one checks on the officemate sent to jail. Slowly, despite itself and with very mixed motives, the tribe emerges out of grubby vulnerability into a kind of crackpot dearness.

Here is where Ferris leaves behind the one-note sensibility of “Dilbert” or the film “Office Space.” Sure, white-collar life can be absurd, riddled with Catch-22, but in his hands, it is layered with a darkly rich stratum of anthropology.

“Then We Came to the End,” a title Ferris mined from Don DeLillo’s novel “Americana,” has its flaws. It is overlong and sags in its midsection. A digression over an unwieldy totem pole adds little. Still, the story’s climax is a doozy of “Oh my god, oh my god” moments, as one character keeps repeating.

“Then We Came to the End” is a beautiful beginning for Joshua Ferris. You won’t want to miss it.