"Personal Days" (review)

[katty]

more: http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-dunn25-2008may25,0,2728369.story

BOOK REVIEW
'Personal Days' by Ed Park
Office workers struggle to survive in this painfully accurate satire

By Samantha Dunn
May 25, 2008
Personal Days

A Novel

Ed Park
Random House

The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel "Personal Days" what World War II was to Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" -- a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason. In "Personal Days," the characters needn't worry about being shot out of the sky by Nazis or slain by friendly fire. In "Personal Days," life force drains slowly, interoffice memo by interoffice memo, one futile PowerPoint presentation at a time.

Park portrays Thoreau's quote about the masses leading "lives of quiet desperation" as urban satire for the dot-com generation. It's a satire at times so droll, so trenchant in its observations of corporate "culture" and human weakness, so pitch-perfect in dialogue, you can't help but feel for the author. Maybe he's a mind reader, or one of those writers so creative that concepts just spring from the head fully formed. But chances are, Park (who writes a monthly online science fiction column for the L.A. Times Book Review) drew from personal experience of really lousy jobs to create this bitter, pathetic world that makes you snort your Starbucks when laughing at unexpected moments.

The plot follows a group of office workers caught in the downsizing-call-it-death of a nameless Manhattan corporation. If the company produces any tangible product, useful service or has even a function, it's lost on these characters, who are trapped in the machinations of office life, expressing themselves in a language increasingly reduced to abbreviations -- ASAP, FYI, UFO, CC and BCC are only the beginning.

[XemaSab]

1. Yeah.

I'm going to have to ask you to come in on SUNDAY too.

Yeah.

[katty]

2. haha