Editor’s Choice
Personal Days byEd Park (Random House, 241 pages, $13 paper original) This is a very funny book. It’s also a bitter and decidedly unlucky one. In fact, it’s rather brilliant in its way and, in almost equal measure, sad.
Its lack of luck resides in this: it is all-too- easy to perceive it as being thematically and tonally and inordinately similar in its humor to NBC’s remake of Ricky Gervais’ TV show “The Office.” While that may be the obvious comparison (along with some other workplace novels), you’d also have to say that the vicious absurdity of office life has always accounted for all manner of great, if often underrated American novels (two that spring to mind: Wilfrid Sheed’s “Office Politics” and, especially, Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” his long-delayed follow-up to “Catch-22” and, by some lights, his finest achievement.)
What’s particularly rankling in Buffalo here about this novel’s ill-fortune is that Park is a native Buffalonian and yet another uncommonly talented member of the 1988 graduating class of Nichols School, along with Nanette Burstein (whose hit film “American Teen” opened in area theaters Friday).
It’s Park’s subsequent post-Buffalo professional life that bears so much fruit in “Personal Days.” While he’s now a prominent blogger (for the L. A. Times and his own New York Ghost) and co-founder, coeditor of the Believer Magazine (which is published by McSweeney’s), he spent a decade as the editor of VLS, the terrifically cheeky literary supplement of the Village Voice. And anyone who thinks the latter experience is incidental to the proceedings of “Personal Days” has another think coming. In Park’s funny and wicked and rending little book, a rabbit warren of employees tries to continue to survive while “The Firings” happen around them and phantom “Californians” threaten disaster. And if that sounds a lot like what was happening at the venerable Village Voice when Park was there, that is no doubt not an accident.
It all ends in an extended stream-of-neurosis that substitutes for Molly Bloom’s consciousness, a “craptrap” e-mail from the heart written while dangling perilously in an elevator shaft.
It’s increasingly extraordinary to think how much talent came from one small place in the same year’s Nichols graduating class.
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The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British bySarah Lyall (Norton, 292 pages, $24.95). Sarah Lyall, frankly, married into the job of London Correspondent for the New York Times. Previously she’d covered Long Island for the Times and state government in Albany before beginning to cover the publishing business. In that capacity, she met Robert McCrum, the British writer and editor, whom she subsequently married. When she moved to London, she became the paper’s de facto London correspondent.
What we have here, then, is a visitor’s guide to the ancient and not-at-all ancient but always notable peculiarities of British life. (If there is any single thing in which the Brits have always led the world, it is peculiarity.) For those, then, who have never had the experience of living among them, we learn (merely in the first chapter): “when invited to a picnic in the country, you should bring an extra sweater, and possibly also some extra food;” “it is considered rude at a party to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know — the rule is you’re supposed to wait to be formally introduced, preferably by your host;” and “Dick Van Dyke’s fake cockney accent in ‘Mary Poppins’ was a travesty and a disgrace.”
By the time the book ends by telling us “Britons are not just fond of talking about the weather, they are fond of talking about why they talk about it,” we have feasted on such things as: parliament where the motto is “better drunk than absent;” and the social mix of “low self-regard with arrogance, indirectness with insincerity. They have a pathological fear of being caught bragging.”
All those and countless others would undoubtedly make residence — or mere passage — among our cousins across the pond infinitely smoother.
An entertaining, indeed delightful, book. If the exchange rate makes going there impossible, read this. It’s cheaper and almost as much fun.
— Jeff Simon
