By Soo Youn
It’s Friday night on L.A.’s Sunset Strip, famous for its trendy restaurants, clubs and legendary hotels where celebrities go to party — think Chateau Marmont and the nightclub Hyde — a technicolor US Weekly backdrop. But a small crowd of hipster literary types has gathered at Book Soup to hear Ed Park read a couple excerpts from Personal Days, his observant, satirical debut novel about the unfortunately familiar terrain of an office in limbo.
“George looks like he’s just come back from vacation and is about to go on another year old, donning khakis, a dark short-sleeve collared shirt and rectangular glasses, describing a lawyer leading a seminar at the fictional office. “His relaxed manner is exhausting to contemplate. All of us secretly wonder why we didn’t go to law school, and also whether it’s too late.”
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Park pauses.
“It is.”
Several people laugh, probably having had similar thoughts earlier in their careers, possibly earlier in their days. The passages are funny, hitting true notes about the banalities of an office where the workers’ true talents (whatever they may be) are underutilized and inexplicable firings pick off one character at a time. The novel, which Newsweek calls “a lyrical and often piercing look at daily life,” explores the personal relationships and coping mechanisms formed as characters try to survive impending layoffs.
A few people in the audience actually used to work with Park, who was an editor at the alt-newsweeklyVillage Voice, which, like the novel’s unnamed company, was bought out by a larger corporate entity. After Phoenix-based New Times acquired the Voice in 2005, Park was one of the staffers ushered out the following year. Before his firing though, he had started the manuscript that turned into Personal Days.
“The genesis of this book was a response to things that were happening in real life,” Park tells me over the phone from his home in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife Sandra, a psychiatrist, and their baby. “I’d write in the morning, and I’d go in work and more people would be fired and then after I was fired, I revised it. If I hadn’t been fired, would I have finished it? In a weird way, it all worked out.”
Since his Village Voice days, Park has used his reprieve from office life to remarkable productivity, as a blogger, an editor of the literary magazine The Believer (which he co-founded in 2003), and an editor at the Poetry Foundation, constantly adding new literary venues and voices to a modern canon in flux. Park also publishes “The New-York Ghost,” a newsletter, writes “Astral Weeks,” a science-fiction column, for the Los Angeles Times, teaches at New York University and will teach at Columbia in the fall. And yet, Park’s diction both in conversation and as an author is so precise, so constantly curated, and his demeanor so calm, that it is seemingly impossible that all these tasks can be completed daily by such an unrushed persona.
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Though it’s his official literary coming-out, Personal Days is not Park’s first novel. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, he says he knew from a young age that he wanted to write and create stories. “I thought, Oh, I’ll write all these books when I grow up,” he says. Park’s father is a psychiatrist, with a keen interest in literature, Korean calligraphy and the writings of P.G. Wodehouse, and his mother was an English major in college, so the fact that he ended up a writer “isn’t too much of a stretch,” he says.
Later, educated at Yale and armed with a master’s of fine arts in creative writing from Columbia University, Park penned two novels while working as a writer and editor in New York. Despite publishing some shorter fiction, the two novels never sold.
Enter Personal Days, which Park says is a marked departure from his two unpublished books. Several people who have known Park for a long time have commented on the book’s surprising humor. “I’ve known Ed since we were at Columbia together in the mid-‘90s, and even back then, I remember thinking he was an amazing writer. When I read a manuscript of Personal Days, I was immediately struck by how funny and full of social commentary it was — not easy things to achieve,” says Vendela Vida, Believer co-founder and author.
Told through an omniscient collective voice, the first two sections are titled with Microsoft Wordcommands, “Can’t Undo” and “Replace All,” which both evoke a sense of foreboding. In the second section, substance succumbs to form, as the developments are relayed in outline form. The third and final section, “Revert to Saved,” taunts the reader with some relief from the barely constrained anxiety of the earlier sections, yet constantly breeds new questions in a first-person e-mail from one of the central characters. Personal Days presents a fractured picture of muted lives, distorted by the hyper self-aware voices of a generation that is missing The Big Picture, only to reveal it was all manipulated anyway.
But don’t expect a roman à clef skewing thinly disguised real-life co-workers. “It’s not like I worked for Anna Wintour — most of my co-workers were not well-known,” Park says, explaining that the characters are, for the most part, completely imagined.
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The other thing that Personal Days is refreshingly not is an ethno-centric anthem. When I joke that the most Korean thing about the novel is the opening epigraph — lyrics from a New Order song — Park doesn’t disagree, explaining that he felt that the book needed a modern, pop reference. But my point launches a conversation about race taking a back seat in this work, remaining one of many things we don’t know about our main characters or our narrators.
“This book was really about this atmosphere of a company crumbling and downsizing and dealing with firings and the psychology of how the characters interact … in a sense, race didn’t even function as a major theme,” says Park.
All this may change, of course, with Park’s next work. He is considering a novel with “some connection to Korea and Korean American stuff,” but he says, “The idea is much more out there.”
Personal Maze
It’s a little difficult to keep track of the characters in the novel, partly because so many of them have names that start with J. To further your reading experience, we came up with a handy cribsheet:
The Sprout: The boss, Russell. (Explainer: Russell ’ Brussels ’ brussel sprouts ’ The Sprout.) Likes corporate speak.
Maxine: Comely supervisor whose full authority remains a mystery, wears alluring clothes.
Pru: Has a master’s in history or art history, likes to knit.
Jack II: Replaced Original Jack, who was fired. Likes to give backrubs, or “jackrubs.”
Crease: Former school teacher whose real name is Chris. “Crease” is the pronunciation of an enamored European former student.
Lizzie: “The nicest of us,” hopes to marry a Swedish baron or win the lottery.
Jonah: Aloof worker who may or may not be bisexual, keeps a Mexican de-stress frog from a supposedvacation to Mexico on his desk.
Laars: Floppy-haired worker who is the only one to have upper body strength. Googles his numerous former flames, due to his frequent vows of chastity.
Jenny: Keeps getting “deported,” absorbs the responsibilities of former colleagues as they get fired.
Jill: Painfully shy worker who is sent to work in “Siberia.”
Jules: Fired worker who opens a restaurant.
—Soo Youn
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