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.”
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-newsweekly Village 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.
