This is the first installment of an ongoing series recommending books from what I’ll call the Funny Novel Canon. Think of it as a working syllabus for literary humorists. If there’s a funny novel you love and think should be included in future installments, email me—nicely please!
Ed Park is a great writer, and his work is always smart and ambitiously challenging in form and structure—see his love of H.S. Keeler’s “web-work”. His latest book, Three Tenses, a well as his Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams, are complex without resorting to gimmicks or cheap obfuscation that implies depth. Park is a genuinely creative writer, who continues to challenge himself to try something new.
But Park’s writing is also tremendously funny. (Full disclosure, we wrote a McSweeney’s piece together so I’m not exactly unbiased.) Some of Park’s funniest writing is in his collection of short pieces, An Oral History of Atlantis, but his first novel, Personal Days, is one of my favorite comic novels of all time.
Personal Days follows a group of office workers who spend their days in the Manhattan offices of a mysterious company with murky goals. Nobody seems to work much, though, the employees are consumed by gossip, crushes, and confusion about their coworkers, superiors, and others who lurk in their building.
The plot roughly follows a central mystery about the company, but this book is memorable for being extremely funny—Park is going for jokes. Personal Days is full of wordplay, dry observations, and weird specifics, and none of it feels tacked on or forced. Coworkers spin up absurd theories about each other, and this setting—the office as the most fertile breeding ground for speculation—allows Park’s absurdities to bend plausibility without breaking it.
The wordplay is especially well done, which will come as no surprise if you’ve read Park’s work before. His funny turns of phrase and memorable names get a lot of laughs, but they’re working at a deeper level too. The homonyms and mishearing are folded into the plot, which turns at a few instances on wordplay and puns.
Like all funny writers, Park is attentive to form, and uses headers and other formal shifts to get in little jokes and control his pacing. I won’t spoil it, but the book also takes a big turn in the last section using a really fun, formal constraint. It’s a wonderful combination of sitcom and Oulipo.
What I love most about this novel is that it’s funny in ways that only writing can be. Too often, humorous novels find comedy by mimicking the things that film and TV do, relying on writing that often feels like transcriptions from the screen. Park takes a different route, relying on jokes and situations that can only happen on the page, which makes Personal Days a very special novel.
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