For the second time this year, we are reading a book about working in an office, which is told partly in the first-person plural. First, there was Joshua Ferris' "Then We Came to the End," which was published in 2007. Now, 2008 brings us Ed Park's "Personal Days." Like Ferris' book, the narrator is unknown, and it's set in an office where everyone is slowly being let go. Ferris' book is a little more dramatic at times, and Park's book is a little funnier. Both are well worth reading. We feel bad for Park, because we already felt that Ferris' book was one of the best books we have read about office life, and now we come across this book which is very similar and could even be better. However, we can't help thinking it's just a little derivative.
That's hardly fair. Ferris' book was published about a year before Park's, but it takes so long for books to be published that Park would have had no idea about Ferris' book while he was writing his own. Sometimes, people come up with similar ideas at the same time. It just happens. It's like when one studio decides to make a killer snake movie, and another studio comes out with a killer snake movie of their own at about the same time. Since we all spend so much time in an office, office comedies are part of the zeitgeist, and, hey, we love the first person plural. In this case, Ferris might have just gotten there first.
Nevertheless, here's our favorite line from "Personal Days:"
"Jack II says that when you feel a tingling in your fingers, it means someone's Googling you." Your fingers just tingled, didn't they?
Jack II is called that because another Jack (known as The Original Jack) used to work in the same office until he was fired. Meanwhile, the boss is known as the Sprout because his name is Russell which sounds like brussels, which come from brussel sprouts. Hence, the Sprout. This is the sort of absolute nonsense that goes on in offices all the time, and Park captures it perfectly.
To be fair, only the first part of Park's book is in the first person plural. After that, (grammatical SPOILERS ahead) the second section is told in the form of an outline. You get the feeling that if Park could have written a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, he would have done so
The last section is an e-mail from one of the characters, in the form of one 40-page run-on sentence, all because his "craptop" which the company won't replace, doesn't have a working period key, a literary technique that causes us to have just a little less interest in the book, partly from being old-fashioned, partly because it seems just a little too clever, and perhaps most importantly, because our pacing was all off without the paragraph, a grammatical element of which we had not realized we were such a fan, to guide us through the reading.
And so a big shout-out to the paragraph!
Despite the snaky tone of this entry, we would recommend this book. It's entertaining and hilarious at times, the kind of book with sections you'll want to read out loud to someone. As for the other parts, we imagine you're not nearly as finicky as we can be at times.
By the way, Gary Shteyngart, whose novel "Absurdistan" we found mildly annoying, says this book contains an "odd, buoyant hope." This would seem to be hope that floats, rather than the kind of hope that sinks to the depths of the sea. We are not entirely sure that this book is at all hopeful, but if there is hope in it, it's definitely of the buoyant variety.
