Life is sharp

"Here's a novel for anyone who feels alienated at work (ie most of us)....Park's eye for the minutiae of office life is sharp: self-Googling, computers that won't correctly format CVs that shouldn't be being written; sexual tensions; smokers who stub out their fags when the boss comes to join them; the Good Starbucks and the Bad Starbucks. That self-conscious, ironic obsession with the trivial that smart metropolitan Americans do so well is much in evidence. (Wherever did the absurd myth that they don't do irony spring from?) This is as funny as Seinfeld." —The Independent

Blunderbuss

If you've ever worked as an office drone, Ed Park's Personal Days will make you both laugh and cringe with familiarity. Park perfectly captures the fear and loathing towards middle management, email blunders, and existential anguish of the New York cubicle grind. —Hyphen

The chills

Portico on Personal Days:

[I]ntensely plotted, [with] a very satisfying surprise ending...a finely-modulated progression of narrative voices...It's as though working at this unnamed company, engaged in its unspecified business, they are living through a slow-motion disaster, an earthquake in freeze-frame, that will not end until they walk out of the funky lower-Manhattan office building for the last time — assuming that blasting in the neighborhood doesn't cause it to topple. The unaffectionate intimacy with which these young people cohabit adjacent cubicles gives the book a snarkily cheerful surface beneath which flow unpredictably chilly currents.

Know what I'm saying?

On BoingBoing, Douglas Rushkoff had this to say about Personal Days:

Personal Days, by Ed Park, is a post-Dilbert, post-Microserfs look at office culture. It's like the show The Office, except populated by people who, for the most part, understand what is happening to them. What I like best about the book is Ed Park's use of cliché phrases. You know how that first song on Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom album (Beyond Belief) strings together known phrases into something entirely bigger? Or the way Delmore Schwartz would italicize a phrase as if to show it was a saying instead of just words? Know what I'm saying? Park does this throughout his text, creating a gentle, phantom hypertext that required no further explanation. And this black comedy about downsizing brings an almost Beckett-like sense of reduction to the dwindling office.

"Stifled Lives at the Office"

"WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?" wonders one of the white-collar serfs who populate Believer editor Ed Park's debut novel, Personal Days. "Where does the life go?" In melancholy deadpan, Park narrates the days when "every straw is the last straw" in a company whose boom years are behind it.

The book's first third unfolds in first-person plural: Park's "we" comprises a shrinking number of bright young things who have begun to dim, day-jobbers who are no longer sure what dreams their jobs feed. This device (varied slightly in the book's middle) blurs the characters in the same haze of shame and depression through which they see one another. It's a dangerous stylistic tack, but Park pulls it off with sharp wordplay and a mind for the absurd. By keeping intimacy at bay early on, he also heightens the pathos of the book's final third, where — in a leaping epistolary confession, written on a "craptop" without a period key — a single character tells his own story and dignifies the stifled lives of his axed colleagues.

Rebellion in this office goes little further than FedEx-ing office supplies to your home, but a battle cry rings between the lines of Personal Days: an angry defense of language against its murder at corporate hands. Park performs riotous burlesques with e-mail misspellings and corporate clichés; his characters hear double-entendres in computer error messages ("You are almost out of memory") and invent new words like "deprotion," for "a promotion that shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion." The novel may even remind you of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

"This is a parody," Orwell wrote after one of his own savage illustrations, "but not a very gross one."

—Josh Kamensky, L.A. Weekly

Warren piece

The Buffalo News's Jeff Simon makes Personal Days his "Editor's Choice," calling it "funny and wicked and rending."

Contagious!

"This absence of novelized work makes a book that restricts itself to the 9-to-5, like Ed Park's cubicle opera Personal Days (Random House), shine all the more. Park points out that those dead, stressed hours make up a separate reality....The final section, a bravura paranoid single-sentence stream-of-consciousness outpouring, shows more skill and contagious joy than any document that also uses 'impact' as a verb should."

—Justin Bauer, Philadelphia City Paper

L Magazine, and a reading at KGB

The summer fiction issue of The L Magazine—free in print and online!—includes EP's "Variations on Original Sin," a part of the novel-in-progress The Dizzies.

New Yorkers! Come here Ed read at KGB on Thursday, July 31, 7 p.m.! With fellow L-mag contributor April Wilder. More info here.

Read what New York magazine has to say...This will be EP's last reading of the summer!

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In other PD news—

Canada's National Post has a "guaranteed summer read"—Personal Days.

And EP jabbers somewhere in the midst of this Korean American radio show out of Chicago (is it called "Ill-Rated"?).

From dawn to distraction

Dale Dauten, in the Arizona Daily Star, fits Personal Days into his cri de coeur:

In reading this and reflecting on how much of the typical office day is spent in nattering, nagging and nothings, I kept thinking: So why do we still have employees come to an office? It's time to admit that there are more distractions at the office than at home, and just give in to the idea of remote employees.

Transatlanticism

In the U.K.: "[Personal Days] offers a very modern insight into the way we work now." —Independent

And in the U.S.: Ed tries to define success for Time Out New York.

PD in TIME magazine

(Thanks to John for the scan.)

Sign of the 'Times'

Personal Days is a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.

(Read the full NYT coverage here.)

"A layoff narrative for our times"

From Mark Sarvas's review of Personal Days in today's New York Times Book Review:

There’s a dark undercurrent to all the whimsy, a Beckettian dread as co-worker after co-worker is blasted out of the desolate landscape....Anyone who has ever groaned to hear “impact” used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....

[I]n the last section — a bravura e-mail soliloquy reminiscent of Molly Bloom — Park uses the first person, and the intensely personal section floods this black-and-white newsreel with vivid color. In a single, fluid release of emotion and truth, the mysteries of the layoffs are solved and a measure of humanity is reclaimed. It is a heartfelt antidote to the comic bleakness of the first two sections.

Park has written what one of his characters calls “a layoff narrative” for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park’s book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn’t a journalist think there can’t be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now.
Photo: Chester Higgins Jr.

From "Three First Novels That Just Might Last" (TIME magazine, July 7)

THE BOOK
Personal Days by Ed Park

THE SETUP
Some office drones work at a moribund company. That's really all Park needs

WHY IT'S GOOD
Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated

FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE ...
The Mezzanine, Then We Came to the End (a book it superficially resembles, but only superficially)

—Time

All I want is everything

A “comic and creepy début novel...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request ‘Does anyone want anything from the outside world?’ ” —The New Yorker

Wednesday, San Francisco; Thursday, Berkeley!

Ed reads at Booksmith on 6/18 (7 pm), and Pegasus Books on 6/19 (7:30 pm).

The San Francisco Examiner calls Personal Days "screamingly funny."

TIP: Bring earplugs!

(More info/links here.)

Decline and fall

When future historians record the decline and fall of American productivity, perhaps they will point to the invention of the office cubicle and to the fatal combination it bred of paranoia and computer-induced catatonia. If so, they may dedicate a footnote to this disquieting satire by Ed Park. —Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe

Persuasion

Unnatural as it is, the office is where we spend most of our time these days. It's become our social theater, which is why Ed Park sometimes sounds like Jane Austen when he describes it. In the first third of his debut novel, Personal Days, Park scrutinizes the rules and rituals of office culture with precision and wit, choosing the most incriminating details and coolly observing the weirdness that festers under the fluorescents. —Becky Ohlsen, The Oregonian

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Ed will be in Portland next Tuesday, but tonight it's all about Newtonville!

Roman à nuttin'

Robert Christgau on Personal Days.

Keybored

"Office drones of the world, your day has come. Your Germinal has arrived....[T]he funniest book I've read in ages....[A]n absolutely hilarious and scary spot-on spoof of life at the keyboard." —The San Diego Union-Tribune