'Personal Days' by Ed Park

A Novel

Ed Park

Random House: 246 pp., $13 paper

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.

The underlings in constant fear of layoff are Jill, Jenny and Pru, Laars, Lizzie and Jonah, Chris -- called Crease -- and Jack II, not to be confused with a laid-off employee called Jack I. Really, there's no need to differentiate among them, because they all spring from the same mold: angst-ridden college grads in their late 20s and early 30s who lack any special passion, love or community to moor them. And that's the point -- or so it would seem from the author's choice to write the first section from the point of view of the Borg-like collective "we." No one is more valuable than another; when one is canned, the others promise to "keep in touch," then close ranks. They're estranged from one another, and they're all they've got.