The corporate downsizing
portrayed in Ed Park's first novel, Personal Days, is happening not with a
bang, but with a whimper: Not merely the last to know when they've been bought
and sold, the employees of this unnamed office, whose specific work is never
made clear, are subjected to a parade of new employees whose jobs are never
specified, and whose authority seems limitless. At the Brooklyn Book Festival
last year, Park took pains to distance his fictional creation from the site of
his last layoff, The Village Voice in New York City, but the blandness of the office
in question lends itself to allegory rather than to roman à clef—a little Douglas Coupland, a little George
Orwell.
The unnamed narrator and
his coworkers toil at nothing but thrive on speculation over who will be fired
next; each meeting, desk reassignment, and compliment is given an ominous
weight. (After a string of firings of people whose names start with J, the
office's Ls begin to fret.) As part of their daily routines, they all ward off
the cloud of unemployment in their own ways, from fixating on a beautiful woman
from another floor to relying on a "Mexican distress frog" whose ridged back
can be played like a marimba. United in their suspicion of unfamiliar faces in
the office, they make vain promises to their laid-off coworkers while clinging
to their rituals of e-mail and errands, marking time by reformatting their résumés
or copying passages from office-politics manuals.
Like last year's
critically acclaimed office novel Then We Came To The End, the work getting done
(or really, not getting done) in Personal Days means nothing compared to
the fragile alliances formed among the passengers on the sinking ship. But
while Came To The End plumbs the depths of corporate uselessness just a little too
long, Park's novel feels curiously abrupt in its final third, in spite of a
James Joyce-esque flourish which purports to explain, in one character's
stream-of-consciousness communiqué, the baffling efforts of management and the
resolution toward which the corporate strategy was batting its pawnlike
workers. The office obsession with the minutiae of their supervisors, from
one's cheery inability to spell to another's routine, foreboding
disappearances, is hilarious but curiously immune to the undercurrent of
despair: The death of the unnamed company is bleak precisely because its
hallmarks are so recognizable, as those pawns struggle to push themselves
forward without becoming targets.