Back in the aughts, I reviewed the wild ’n’ wooly graphic novel Seaguy, and I was extremely fortunate to have a Voice editor who understood that my single-sentence, 210-word assessment was an attempt to convey the pell-mell pleasures of the tale’s brilliantly interwoven absurdities.
A similar frisson of insight arose from that editor’s first novel, Personal Days, an often LOL excursion into the cubicles and break rooms of the mid-2000s office realm, where computers reprimanded users by flashing “Invalid Command” onscreen and everyone dreaded the corporate specialty of that downsizing epoch, a “deprotion, which is a promotion that shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion.”
Fast forward 15 years, and Ed Park’s second novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, is scheduled to hit bookstores this Tuesday, November 7. Envisioning a secretive group of far-flung Koreans seeking to reunite their country, plus the discovery by a former writer now employed by the tech behemoth GLOAT of an unfinished but riveting manuscript about these clandestine lever-pullers, Park entwines geopolitics with American pop culture — and possible world war. M*A*S*H and the Moonies and Marilyn Monroe are all part of the mix, blending into what writer Cathy Park Hong describes in a blurb as “an extraordinary — and hilarious — genre-busting nesting doll of comedy, science fiction, and thriller.”
Here’s a taste:
My appearance was a solid for Tanner Slow: old college roommate, dispenser of numerous good deeds on my behalf, and main link to the life I’d led years ago. Tanner had worn many hats over the years. He’d been a music journalist, fired for not liking music, and briefly a literary agent — he sold my first and only book, a story collection that I couldn’t bear to look at anymore. He once ran a Tucson charity that gave bikes to the homeless, and even worked at GLOAT in the aughts, hiring me during his brief tenure. But after his father the vitamin king died and left him a zillion dollars, Tanner set up the Slow Press, devoted to his three idiosyncratic passions: political graphic novels done with woodcuts, niche cookbooks, and neglected literature in translation. Last season he’d released a revisionist account of the Haymarket Riot, a set of Malaysian curry recipes that could be done using only a rice cooker, and a collection of nature essays by “Uganda’s E. B. White.”
Always erudite and wittily droll, Park will no doubt give as good as he gets when he is interviewed on November 7 by Hua Hsu, at the Center For Fiction, in Brooklyn, and two days later by Miwa Messer, at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side. ❖
