Bits & Pieces: Ferris's story in the New Yorker

Josh Ferris's first novel And Then We Come to the End (?) was probably the best I've ever read about the weirdness and horrors of corporate culture - a really captivating and entertaining book, funny on the surface but with a dark heart. I haven't read much by him since then, and was glad to see his story The Fragments in the current New Yorker - and I enjoyed the story as kind of a one-off, not a great story by any stretch but very successful within its small scope: a 20ish (I'm guessing) Manhattan guy lives through a few days of angst as he gradually surmises that his wife isn't staying out late on business but she's having an affair; in despair, he calls out from his window that he's giving stuff away. People start coming up to his apartment, skeptical at first - is this really your place? - but eventually they start walking away with pillows, lamps, etc. (I'd think they'd be really worried that they're being scammed - but to what end? - they are, in a sense being scammed - robbing someone to exact personal revenge for another) - wife comes home and tries to figure out what's going on. Okay, what makes this story special and unusual, though, is the motif that the main character wanders the streets of NYC every day, in sorrow and anguish, and he overhears many fragments of conversation as people pass by him - sometimes in dialogue, often yapping into a cell phone. The fragments of conversation are the counterpoint, or the basso continuo perhaps, of this story, and give us a map of the ragged (or rugged) emotional terrain of New Yorkers. Very good idea brought off well - but if I were Ferris's writing coach (fat chance) I would encourage him to push it even farther: why not a story built entirely from the fragments of conversation that a passerby hears, and the narrative builds around him in surprising and odd ways. Or, even farther, why not a story with no "him," no one hearing the conversational fragments but us, the reader?