Odd that…

It seems to be a feature of the publishing world that several books about the same thing come on to the market at the same time, in non-fiction especially. Nothing on a subject for years and then 3 books come along at once. This can be rather confusing for readers and for booksellers (viz. “Can I have the new book about the Boer War, please?” “Errr, which one?” “I don’t know, the new one.” (etc.) Or the entire misery-memoir genre. Or all those novels about Henry James that came out in a glut).

For today’s purposes it’s novels about life in an office where there are a lot of layoffs happening and the narrator constantly uses “we” instead of “I”. First out of the blocks was Joshua Ferris with “Then we Came to the End” and next up (next month) is Ed Park with “Personal Days”. I liked “Then we Came to the End” even if I did find the “we” a bit irritating, and for a while reading “Personal Days” I thought it was a more fractured, less witty version, a kind of a “blah” book, which in itself was odd because the reviews I read from the US were stunning (in fact, a work-mate who had started to read it, passed it on to me as she wasn’t really enjoying it and thought I’d like it). Thing is, Parks lays the groundwork in the early part of the book for a series of shocks when you…come to the end (sorry!), and they make the whole thing work. He’s very honest about people in the workplace, their odd paranoias and the vagaries of software like MS Word, which you can feel is out to get you (I relate), plus the mis-transcriptions of voice-recognition software, and the mentality of a work-force under pressure.

It’s a fun little book, with some irritating quirks (the entire second section is written in contract style, even though it’s narrative, with each “event” given and new number and each paragraph a sub-heading, bit pointless really, but then he was one of the founding editors of “the Believer” so there would have to be some McSweeney’s-isms in there) and he slips from “we” to “they” at one point, which made me flick back and forth to find out which employee was missing and wonder if they were the narrator (don’t know, couldn’t quite figure that one, am not very bright). The book comes into its own with the arrival of “Grime” a bizarre Englishman who can’t type (and doesn’t care) and can’t seem to follow the rudiments of computing, or social niceties, or anything much really. He becomes an object of fascination for a while among the women (floppy-hair, English, “Grime” is how he says “Graham”) who then are put off by the fact that his once endearing oddness seems to run far deeper than they thought….

So while Ed Park will have to compete with “Then we Came to the End” with its Richard and Judy status and all of that buzz, it should stand up rather well on its own, provided the reader perseveres, because it is in fact a different enough beast to merit attention. And it’s funny. In a giggle-inducing kind of way.