Hamlet at the Water Cooler

The outline, divided down to fourth and fifth subpoints like an infinite enumeration of interoffice terror, struggles to put order to a nervous stampede. Amid this tension the characters retreat and regress, and grow sets of bodily ailments to rival those of the Underground Man: spasmodic eye flutters, constant ringing in the ears, strange afflictions of speechlessness and an outbreak of contagious psychosomatic back pain. On the advice of Pru, the office MFA, they work on their "layoff narratives": personalized chronologies of job loss, so they can better process termination when it comes, even while realizing, "Once you start constructing the layoff narrative, it's only a matter of time. It starts to feel like a fait accompli."

They grow ever more superstitious, assigning magical power to the time stamps on their e-mails—9:11 being the unluckiest time of day to receive a message from a boss—and imagining that their computers are watching them, conspiring to keep them from pursuing other job opportunities. The computers are beyond anthropomorphized, but so personally connected to them that the system crashes in tandem with the employees at the flirtations of the office vamp.

"Our machines know more than we do," Pru offers as a moral (culled from her current sci-fi reading), identifying the strangely "instinctive" failings of their office computers. They search for clues everywhere: in a mysterious notebook, "The Jilliad," found after the guillotine-swift firing of its author, Jill, while they were out to lunch one day. The Jilliad is a spiral-bound compilation of dreadful, contradictory passages of business wisdom: career self-help guides and CEO memoirs. They seize on it as in turns pathetic, prophetic and "found" art: a bitter judgment on the clichés of corporate doublethink. Jonah, if not the group's moral center at least its center of moral outrage, balking at the increasing indignities the company foists on them—in a particularly cruel instance, imposing a time-stamp card system on the employees that collects no actual information but exists solely to demoralize—finds another guiding philosophy. After returning from a vacation in Mexico he tells his colleagues about a mythological Mexican chieftain "who ruled by confusion," constant division of the ranks and bewildering opposing commands: sending troops north, then south, on rumors of various invading armies. Though you wouldn't guess it, Jonah dryly informs the group, this system of rule apparently worked for some centuries.

Armed with this insight into "leadership," arguably as valid a battle plan as the collective wisdom of The Sprout's office-warrior bookshelf, Jonah is the only member of the group who manages to break out of the office's fatalistic sense of karmic predestination—what goes around is coming around, and it's likely got a blade—breaking from the pack in what is to him at first a revolting self-realization. Upon finding The Jilliad, Jonah realizes he has his own morsels of business wisdom to enter into what he comes to call "the Notebook of Power." He discovers, to his horror and eventual acceptance, that he has not only a "management style" but also a surprising capacity for ambition and ruthless self-advancement. He makes a particularly unlikely mercenary—he is earlier described as a should-be union organizer or philosophy professor, bringing unusable but lovely bits of wisdom to company sexual harassment seminars ("Don't we need Eros in order for commerce to happen?"). But it's Jonah who unravels the mystery of who in fact is doing the company in, from within, while all others, lookers, overlords and victims alike, are paralyzed in the face of a golemlike figure: corporate culture and management clichés made flesh in the body of their tormentor.

Breaking through this, Jonah narrates the final section, "Revert to Saved," in a style so different that Park gives it its own font: a soulful love letter and apologia that distills the gracefulness of Park's prose throughout the book to a single elegant voice, the individual that was before entering the assembly line of the Jobmilla nightmare. But while other literary victors in the office world offer a dark moral—taking command of the corporate dream leads to losing one's soul—Jonah emerges as strangely whole and human for his office coup. Rather than passively participating in his obsolescence, he's able to recognize the haphazard standards determining the futures of scores of employees, to recognize the system as corrupt and the bureaucratese cowing his peers as absurd, and still to make a separate peace. It may be a murky moral for recession times, but better than that, it's a lyrical and often piercing look at daily life made strange and beautiful by faithful transcription.

© 2008