Hamlet at the Water Cooler

"Random poignancy circa 2:30," reads one of the subheds in Ed Park's new office life novel, "Personal Days." "Is Excel crashing everyone's computer?" Reprising the theme throughout the book, it's the fixtures of work life, particularly the koanlike dialogue boxes that pop up on office computer screens, that provide such incidental profundity and wisdom. "I don't understand," computers tell their operators, or halt employees in their tracks with the poetic-sounding verdict "Invalid Command." Or best of all, to the despairing amusement of the young set of office workers huddling aboard a slowly sinking company ship, is the closing pop-up question of each work week, when they shut off their computers to embark on "modest hopes" for the weekend: "Are you sure you want to quit?"

The book is ornately divided into three sections, with three vantage points, their titles taken from what are familiar computer prompts and commands to modern office workers: "Can't Undo," "Replace All," "Revert to Saved." In "Can't Undo" the voice is that of the communal "we" of the young pool of overqualified, undermotivated office workers—Pru, Lizzie, Jonah, Laars, "Crease"—who are floating through their mid-20s in a low-grade depression regarding their prospects. But their dejection is made bearable by their catalog of coping methods: Brentian psychologists versus cut-rate "life coaches"; workday weeping sessions in the bathroom or the adoption of exotic worry objects, such as the "Mexican distress frog" Jonah buys to soothe his ragged nerves. All the members of the group are survivors of a severe downsizing—"the Firings," they call it, always capitalized—in their Manhattan company, now "the easternmost arm of an Omaha-based Octopus." The Firings were a year earlier, but increasingly the survivors are menaced by the prospect of new potential buyers, "The Californians," and a fresh wave of employment horror that may follow the takeover.

Trapped between one set of pink slips and anticipation of a second round in the middle future, they drink together ("one or two nights a week, sometimes three … Three is too much"), keeping tabs of who buys. They keep watch of the wardrobe of their frighteningly alluring supervisor, and of the eccentricities of their boss, "The Sprout," a nervous bundle of glad-handing neurosis and management clichés who laughs and cries with the same broken squawk, "Hoo hoo!" The descriptions of The Sprout can't help recalling "The Office"'s Steve Carell, though that's likely to be the bane of any current book of office literature with a comically uncouth boss. With often pitch-perfect delivery, Park chronicles the grind of daily office tedium, which wears the clique down into professional cynics and observers, from the tricky politics of e-mailing a supervisor (a "psychotic" peppiness "barely stifling a howl of fear") to the shelved individual passion projects none of them wants to discuss.

The group works across from the construction site of the "Infinity building," a mobius strip-shaped structure rising beside their own company home in a building frequently featured in commercials for an employment company called "Jobmilla." The commercials envision life behind the foreboding facade of their building as a desolate factory assembly line, processing a conveyer belt of sad-sack employees into a crop of well-adjusted, productive workers. The company's cryptic slogan, "What goes around comes around," is suspected of  being deliberately nonsensical, tapping into viewers' vague notions of "office karma," but nonetheless it feeds into the mystical approach the group adopts toward its circumstances, a blend of fatalism and superstition that leaves them painfully stagnated and helpless in the face of their futures. They all secretly wonder whether it's too late for another path—law school, say—and come quickly to the answer, "It is." They tell themselves they can't be the next on the chopping block because they are exploited as is, and they wait together. "It's possible we can't stand each other," muses the groupthink narrator, "but at this point we're helpless in the company of outsiders."

If these descriptions sound precious, at times they skate close to it, reminiscent of the hyperliterate precociousness that typifies much recent literature and cinema. But Park deftly keeps his characters just this side of hipster cuteness. There are ironic softball leagues and an office full of college grads in Almond Joy T-shirts, but on the whole the writing has more heart and smarts than such atmospheric quirkiness. Park has a sound sense both of his characters' kindness and banality, and as the novel progresses he succeeds in nailing the note of false ennui the young group at first gives off, exposing not just their dull, sad anxieties but the sweet affection they do develop for each other, with sharp and lovely language.

In the second section, "Replace All," the narrative voice shifts abruptly to third person, laid out entirely in outline form, starting with "II (A) Asylum." And it is an asylum, and a transparent attempt to order it, that takes place as the office starts to unravel under the top-down pressure from "The Californians," as well as from an undercover interloper who sows terror in both management and the disaffected young staff, all of whom startle and freeze in the face of impending impact. An ax hangs over them—and literally appears in a hallway one day, as though summoned by their collective fear. In this harsh new environment—"Replace all"—their irony melts away, and the detached voice of the outside observer judges them, and their young affectations, coldly: "Any minor eccentricity could be deemed wild or out of control. Such language convinced them they were more interesting than they suspected they really were. It was crucial that they never contemplated the possibility of their inherent, overwhelming dullness."