So you’re on a bus or the subway right now, heading toward your tiny cubicle in an office where the future is anything but certain. Take heart: you’re just like many of the characters depicted in Ed Park’s new comic—and sardonic—novel "Personal Days." Formerly editor of the literary supplement at the Village Voice, "Personal Days" is largely inspired by Park’s experiences at the alt-weekly, which was purchased by a national chain a few years back and thoroughly reorganized, resulting in Park and many other writers and editors being laid off.

The reviews of "Personal Days" emphasize its humor, but it’s also very dark.
I’d agree with that. I did want it to be a comic novel in a sense. But that’s really limited to the first part; in the second and third, things start getting quite dark. And while I like that kind of writing—P.G. Wodehouse is one of my favorite writers—purely funny books are hard to do, and this is a pretty serious book in many ways as well. The question is whether one can write a purely comic novel about something as dehumanizing as mass corporate layoffs. There’s a lingering unease and something slightly gossipy and sour about it.

And you would know, of course, about corporate restructuring and layoffs.
Let’s just say I’m certainly depicting it so it feels honest to the experience. One reason I change narrative voices in the second and third parts is to put the reader in a position to experience this abrupt shift, to kind of pull the carpet out from under their feet.

One could read a lot of "Personal Days" as being very anti-management, actually.
I think corporate managers are put in a tough position. I’ve never really had any management job, but I see that you answer to two different masters—you want your employees productive without alienating them, and you answer to your owners. The whole structure of companies makes being a manager thankless because you can’t satisfy both sides.

Is that why the fictional managers you create in the book seem so utterly creepy?
With mergers and restructuring it gets to a point where you don’t know who your boss’ boss is, you know? That’s frightening, but there’s also something absurd about it. With the Village Voice, the new owners in Phoenix and Denver were suddenly calling the shots and clearly they didn’t know anything about New York. It became a situation where I knew when I was being laid off because I got an email from an address I’d never seen before—it revealed nothing yet revealed everything at the same time.

There’s also an undertone of anger here. A bit of autobiography there?
The night I was laid off I was really angry. I felt violated. I was a little shocked at how emotional I was. The next day I was better—and in lots of ways it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I couldn’t be happy working there now and I don’t read the Voice anymore—I don’t know anyone who does. The contempt that people in Phoenix and Denver had for most things about the Voice was amazing. And I wasn’t hesitant to talk to the media about how awful those people are.

Let me ask you about the final section of the book—written as a single sentence.
I wanted it to be grammatically accurate and for there to be a constraint on my writing, partly as a challenge but partly to organize the section. I knew a lot of things needed to happen in it and that various mysteries in the book had to be solved, like who is doing the firing of the workers. And I knew the tone would be radically different from the first two sections—I was really getting deep into the back story of a single character. Of all the sections, it definitely took the longest to write. It was a lot of writing and then reading things over and tossing out anything that wasn’t working.

You’ve written so many reviews of fiction—did you have to take time away from everyone else’s voices to focus on your own?
At a basic level I enjoy reading, so I think whereas a younger writer might have said, “Oh, I can’t be reading such and such while I write because I don’t want my voice to be influenced,” I didn’t have to do that. I also think outside influences actually inform one’s voice. So let’s say I’m setting out to pay homage to Wodehouse—no one’s going to mistake my work for his. Also, I realized with "Personal Days" that I had a great topic, that I was really pushing the envelope in ways I cared about. It wasn’t me going into some hermetically sealed environment with this rarified object—this was something that emotionally was more than anything I’d previously done, having been within a crumbling company for a few years.

As a critic, do you think there are higher expectations for your work?
I don’t think I feel raised expectations. It’s like—does anybody care about me or about this book knowing how many of them come out? I also write a column on science fiction for the L.A. Times, and though within that genre there’s a lot of junk, there’s a lot of interesting stuff, too. I know there are lots of worthy titles out there that don’t get coverage, so it’s great to see my book getting coverage at all.

Photo credit: Sylvia Placy