SoA Alumnus Ed Park brings ‘Office’ humor to debut novel

“I don’t want to get too mystical,” Ed Park, SoA ’95 and a creative writing professor at the School of the Arts, said. “It’s almost like a mysterious process that’s going on that you’re barely conscious of until it happens.”

This is how Park described the writing process for his debut novel “Personal Days.” Marketed as “‘The Office’ in book form,” “Personal Days” was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway award and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. It also appeared on Time Magazine’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2008.

“Most characters don’t even have last names—I realized that was the kind of atmosphere I wanted to create,” Park said of the oftentimes foreboding climate of an unnamed New York company where layoffs grew rampant. “Personal Days” is “loosely based” upon his personal work experience. As the founding editor of the literary magazine The Believer and the former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement, Park has plenty of fodder from which to draw inspiration.

“Personal Days” is an account of life in a modern office, divided into three parts. Narrated in the first-person plural, the first part, “Can’t Undo,” depicts employees braving the first round of firings doled out by the Sprout, their nickname for their maddening boss. The absurdity of workplace existence —e-mailed photos of cats in sinks or a mysterious rotten banana in the fridge—soon becomes eerie, reminiscent of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

In the novel’s third-person-narrated second part, “Replace All,” an employee eavesdrops on what sounds like a conspiracy at the boss’s desk—the “Californians” take over the company, and the firings increase. While the format of the second part is reminiscent of a legal document, the third part, “Revert to Saved,” is written in e-mail form from the first-person perspective of Jonah, further unraveling the office dynamics. His confessional, personal letter, written entirely without periods, gives insight into the less personal previous parts and charges the novel with emotion.

Park did not plan to employ the seldom-used first-person plural as a narrative voice, it was more of a happy accident. “I realized after 50 pages in that I hadn’t actually decided on who the narrator was,” Park explained. The more characters were added, the more he could not side with one of them. The movement from the first to the third part also reflects the shift in point of view. “It’s a bit unorthodox,” admitted Park of the novel’s experimental formal qualities.

“Personal Days” sheds a comic light on the evolving nature of language, down to abbreviations such as TMI or FYI. Park finds this phenomenon “kind of interesting.” As he said, “Language is never static.” He appreciates how the different ways in which people talk and text, whether to bosses or coworkers, augment flexibility in language.
“Personal Days” is laugh-out-loud funny and highly culturally relevant in its examination of the Internet’s effects on human interaction. As Park said, “language is a snapshot of its time,” and his book is very much a snapshot of ours. While it is sometimes difficult to tell the characters apart in the first two parts, the third part finally focuses on one character, and the connection we feel to him is redeeming.