Sunday, November 01, 2015

Ed Park's Very Personal Days . . .


I finished Ed Park's first novel, Personal Days: A Novel - to be precise, a very funny (laugh-out-loud-on-the-subway type of funny) novel of workplace relations in a failing corporation - and I give it a 4.99 out of 5 simply because nothing's perfect, in this case, a period missing in the last section, "Revert to Saved"

I never did locate that missing period (unless this is it: "."), but if Jonah was three days in the belly of the whale, that's a period long enough for me!

And there really is a "Jonah," Park's Jonah, who's trapped between floors in the building's innards on an elevator stuck in its shaft (some reviewers might pun that Jonah got the shaft, but I shall not sink to that level), and he's typing a long literary missive in the dark to fellow-worker Pru, who perhaps never receives it since it's returned by a mailer demon as "could not be delivered."

This second Jonah's entrapment begins on a Friday and conceivably lasts three nights before Monday morning arrives, when he can emerge from his tome like a modern-day Jonah.

I'll stop here, on page 242, since the story does, as well (in its Kindle version), but I'll add that the tale is not only very funny, but also somewhat sad.

Unless the tale is actually a comedy, as the fact that it's published and even has readers may imply . . .

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