Activity Report: On Ed Park's new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams.

A sidebar to my review of his novel that is at least as long as my review.

This photo is my only photo in my archive of the galley for Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams, which I reviewed for the New Republic as I mentioned in the last installment, one of my major accomplishments from last fall. I think of this as like the book galley version of one of those magazine ads where the model has a date on each arm. And these three do make a fine trio. I will write more on the other two later this year but in any case, today’s newsletter is about how that review is now out online and will appear in the March issue of the print magazine, an interesting coincidence given the significance of March 1st in Korea and in the novel.

My editor at TNR saw many drafts and we whacked many paragraphs out of the review, which I decided during the edit I would then use here, in this newsletter, because I still like them and would have them read. It’s just the nature of any review: trying to get an elephant, or in this case, an entire circus, to fit inside of a tea-cup and then to serve it. I’m also a fan of the block quote in my reviews, which also always get cut, but in my newsletter, I can of course use them as much as I want. This newsletter is both my effective as well as literal expansion-pack. Anyway, thus begins this experiment, and I hope to do more along these lines going forward.

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Ed Park is not by any means a conventional American novelist and he comes by his variation from the norm honestly. He is a Korean American writer and editor from Buffalo, NY, and he went to Yale for his undergraduate and to Columbia for his MFA in fiction, working at Voice Literary Supplement, or VLS as it came to be known, a much-missed literary magazine experiment that no longer exists. He went on to co-found The Believer, with Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida, a literary magazine that could modestly be said to have remade American literary culture, and eventually became a mainstay of that culture. He’s even returned to editing that magazine since it was relaunched after a series of events that rescued it from becoming a kind of culture park to a sex toy company, and that could have come from an as yet unwritten Ed Park novel. Amazon Publishing once created an imprint for him, Little A, that lives on without him now as he has since moved on to Penguin Press, and somewhere in all of this he also began and kept up an email zine, NY-Ghost, that he shares by email pdf for free on the most semi-occasional basis, and he just asks that you print it out in order to read it. 

This is an entire career for many people plus hobbies, it should be said. And so now we turn to his novelist career.

It has been 15 years since Ed Park’s debut novel and yet you may know him because of it. Personal Days, released in 2008, made a reputation for Park as a sure-shot social satirist, “a master of the deadpan vernacular,” as Helen DeWitt said of it at the time, which feels very true to me. This novel about the ambient paranoia in the lives of co-workers in an anonymous company office, working as the company lays people off and falls apart, seemed like an extreme version of corporate culture at the time even as it also felt like Park was perhaps one of the few writers who was able to really see into the state of American employment at the time for the white collar worker. The novel is still one of those books shared by friends as a way to say you love them enough to give them a good book.  

Ed’s career is a many-sided, prismatic thing, in other words, with sides to it that we most likely still don’t know about because he loves a secret side project to his secret side project. He is also a critic, for example, writing comics criticism for the New York Review of Books, and he is an influential critic, I’d contend: his 2015 New Yorker review of the Dalkey Archives’ Korean Literature in translation series was to my mind a watershed moment for the relationship between Korean literature and American culture and Korean American literature, one of the stops along the way to the cultural moment we are in now, one that has us reading and talking about Han Kang and Sang Young Park as well as Michelle Zauner and Min Jin Lee.  

Park drills more deeply into the ambient paranoia of American life here in this second novel. The companies at the center here are American and have names like GLOAT, a satire of a mix of several tech companies but almost certainly a spoof on Google, and Harmony Holdings, that may or may not be named for a mishearing of Halmoni, the Korean word for grandmother. Characters’ names change also with many of the characters revealed to have other older or newer identities depending on where you are in the timeline of the novel.

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Same Bed Different Dreams took over my life while I read it. For example, there’s a section where one of the narrators, the former short story writer Soon Sheen, can’t seem to find the rare Korean novel he is reading, and during that section I kept misplacing this novel too. I would frantically hunt around my house for it and then when I found it, think, What are you doing to me? And then read it again and lose it again, and off I was on another desperate search. 

And much like I was, Soon Sheen is taken over by the rare Korean novel he is reading, a novel with the same name as the novel I was reading. 

Sheen’s sections are one of the novel’s three spines—and his is perhaps the spine most recognizably formed around a single character. Sheen is an employee of the aforementioned GLOAT and we meet him on a portentous evening for the novel in the company of a group of characters who we will follow in different ways in the pages to come, though it is not at all clear on that evening. We realize fairly quickly we are in a kind of mirror world, like that in the Superman comics, a Korean American Bizarro World, not so different from our current world. Soon Sheen is a funny doppleganger for Park, for example, the Bizarro-world version of him, unsuccessful where he has been successful. In Sheen’s chapters, Korean Americans are running everything important to this novel. Sheen for example is a Korean American writer who gave up on writing after publishing a short story collection almost no one read, and is now a powerful executive at GLOAT, a little indifferent to his power, and married to a Korean American woman who runs a successful chain of nail shops. They have a daughter, a white adoptee, the clearest signal of the inverted universe here. On the night we meet him, he’s being courted by a publisher friend to read a new novel by an avant-guard Korean writer named E. Cho—yes, Echo—who has the sort of preposterous literary bad boy reputation that used to impress Americans. His full name, Eujin Cho, I realized, is also the name of the hero in the Kdrama Mr. Sunshine, though I am not sure if this means anything still except to me.

We enter the novel Soon is reading with him, divided into sections that are named Dream 1, Dream 2, Dream 3, and so on. In those dreams are the stories of the Korean Provisional Government, or KPG, a real organization taken from history that for a time was an unsuccessful effort to defeat the Japanese forces and their 35 year occupation of Korea.

These dreams are the second spine, interspersed with sections from the third spine, about the literary legacy of a Black veteran of the Korean War, Parker Jotter, who lives in Buffalo, NY. His MiG went down in North Korea during a bombing raid shortly after he was dazzled by a UFO during flight. In his captivity he tries to make sense of his plane’s downing, and as that effort continues, he becomes an author of a series of unsuccessful science fiction novels that eventually achieve cult success and also make their way into the KPG Dream Chapters. It’s a novel about secret plotters, about those destroyed by governments that barely know who they are or why they could matter, and their survivors, who dream in secret of a revenge they might not live to see enacted, and are, mostly, also lost. It’s an interconnected short story collection in a way, if those stories were conspiracy theories that gradually revealed they weren’t conspiracies at all, but the truth.

It’s also a novel that suggests that whatever your conspiracy is, the truth might be worse. The aforementioned block quote:

I knew people who religiously opposed GLOAT, railing against its reach. Its presence was more ubiquitous than most of them imagined. It claimed to foster connection and information, but instead led users to create echo chambers. It profited off services that they didn’t know it owned, from meme factories and food delivery to a furniture barter site and a popular “alternative” horoscope newsletter. A growing range of smart devices had layers of GLOAT technology within: “handless” electric shavers, self-measuring rice cookers, home-security drones. Sprout’s dog collar didn’t just collect data on his health but knew our house’s layout, collected the shopping habits of our neighbors. No one could stay completely pure.

I made note of the many tiny connections at first thinking to use them in the review but of course not only are those spoilers, but such an effort would end up with me looking like someone in front of a murder wall, insisting on a theory held together by string and tacks and photos of people you can almost make out. Which is also some of what Park is doing, except that he has taken many years to do this, making the effort to vanish from his place in front of the wall, so that we wander its yarns, collecting what is left behind as our own.

By the end of reading Same Bed, Different Dreams, I felt like I had emerged from a long tunnel of uncertain dimensions. I wasn’t sure how I’d been changed. I did not expect so much of America to be in this novel. I did not expect us to end up in Buffalo, or in upstate New York in the town of Dogskill, a clear mirror world satire of the Catskills region. I learned about the ways social media companies try to trick information out of users and how they incentivize the creation of those tricks with their employees. The Asian American literary world is lovingly satirized here also, as it was if not as it is now, and even the need of a dog to bury something becomes a plot device. Dogskill indeed.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed this expansion pack episode of my newsletter, and that you will read the review and the novel both.