Personal Days

You might remember Melville’s Bartleby, the guy whose last job was so demeaning and pointlessly laborious that it left him scarred and—more importantly—unproductive at his new gig. Less memorable, however, are the two coworkers he joins there, Turkey and Nippers. One’s a drunk and the other suffers from chronic indigestion, but they get the job done because the drunk waits until the afternoon to get wasted, by which point the bellyacher is usually feeling well enough to work. It’s a symbiosis of semiproductivity—of good enough—and it’s one of literature’s first office ecologies.

Park’s debut novel shows that what’s changed in the office milieu over the past century-and-a-half is as telling as what hasn’t. Throw in some spreadsheets and some Post-it notes, and you’re still in the same warren of functional absurdity and alienated purpose. In an office undergoing a slow and agonizing downsizing, Park’s ensemble of coworkers pass the day and ignore their plight as best they’re able: with crushes, smoke breaks and the updating of their résumés. But it’s the haze they inhabit that ultimately defines them. Time hurtles forward indifferently, and the stuff that’s supposed to matter, like family and fulfillment, are peripheral at best. Park’s narration is mum on the work they do and keenly focused on the minutiae and distractions that agitate and entertain these Turkeys and Nippers as they slouch toward 5:00. As these characters half-heartedly search for a purpose and a story that will save them, Park pulls off some dazzling structural and narrative play. The novel climaxes in a single, 50-page sentence, and it actually works. It’s in this last section that the layoff-punctuated haze takes on its full significance, going deeper and darker than you might expect. Park’s Bartleby, it turns out, isn’t nearly so harmless as the original.