Evaluate: Ed Park’s speculative novel ‘Identical Mattress Completely different Desires’

Ed Park’s first novel, “Private Days,” occurred within the workplaces of an unnamed firm and satirized the hole subterfuge of corporate-speak. Divided into three sections that every make use of a unique narrative method, Park’s 2008 debut teemed with the enterprise vernacular of emails, memos and conferences, and the sheer number of voices and kinds leads to a twin portrait of the corporate’s staff and its collective ethos.

Park’s follow-up, “Identical Mattress Completely different Desires,” arrives a full decade and a half later, with all of the heft, complexity and ambition such a prolonged interim suggests. The creator has enormously expanded his literary scope and complex his narrative method, although sure fundamentals stay.

Relatively than a portrait of an organization, the entity on the heart of Park’s new novel is a rustic, and this time it’s not an nameless consultant of a standard tradition however an actual place: Korea. His particular focus is its resistance to Japanese rule from the early twentieth century till the top of World Warfare II, when Japan relinquished management and Korea break up into North and South.

Utilizing the true historical past of the Korean Provisional Authorities (KPG) as his place to begin, Park weaves into the factual accounts alternate variations of Korea’s destiny, wherein the KPG’s attain and membership lengthen effectively past nationwide borders. Quite a few individuals who had nothing to do with the group, a few of whom died earlier than the KPG’s inception in 1919, are given honorary membership, because the KPG is “extra a mind-set than an precise governing physique,” leading to an ever-growing mosaic of disparate figures together with Marilyn Monroe and Jesus Christ.

Along with its historical past, Park additionally explores the varied methods different cultures depicted Korea — from George Trumbull Ladd’s “In Korea with Marquis Ito” to the James Bond henchman Oddjob — and the way these views supported Japan’s occupation. After Japan surrenders in 1945, the KPG’s efforts reverberate by way of the postwar period in methods each true and fictional.

However that is solely a 3rd of “Identical Mattress Completely different Desires,” which braids three plots collectively in a bewilderingly layered construction. One part, set in an alternate present-day New York, focuses on a once-promising author named Quickly Sheen who by no means adopted up an acclaimed debut that had the misfortune of being printed on 9/11. He now works for a megacorporation identified by the Pynchonian acronym GLOAT, the which means of which even its staff aren’t sure about (they joke that it stands for “Good luck on all that”).

Nonetheless peripherally engaged within the literary scene, Quickly encounters an growing older creator named Echo, the “enfant horrible of South Korean letters,” whose novels are lastly being translated into English by a small press. Echo is a portmanteau of the author’s given title, Cho Eujin — an effort by the writer to market his books to American readers. Echo’s translator tells Quickly about an unfinished Echo masterpiece, a “hidden historical past of Korea” known as “Identical Mattress, Completely different Desires” (“We would lose the comma,” the translator notes). On the prepare journey dwelling, Quickly discovers the manuscript in his bag.

Thus, as we transfer by way of the intricate and revelatory story of Korea’s unheralded heroes and what might need been if their group had continued on, Quickly reads proper together with us, commenting on its contents.

However there’s extra. A 3rd thread of Park’s absurdly advanced novel includes a long-forgotten sequence of sci-fi novels printed within the Fifties and ‘60s below the final title “2333.” These goofy house operas have been the work of a Black Korean Warfare vet named Parker Jotter, a fighter pilot who’d been taken prisoner after crashing his aircraft. Within the late ‘70s, Jotter’s books are rediscovered when two board recreation builders are commissioned by a mysterious benefactor to adapt them into a posh recreation. The principles and logistics of the consequence, Galactic Legions, are uploaded into an early pc program that in the end kinds the premise of a software program firm. Within the early 2000s GLOAT acquires the now-defunct firm, which incorporates Jotter’s books and 33 packing containers of his unpublished writing, and adapts the fundamentals of Galactic Legions into an academic software known as Hegemon.

Though “Identical Mattress Completely different Desires” is among the most circuitously structured novels in latest reminiscence, the reader is rarely confused about what’s occurring within the sensible sense. The trail is at all times clear. It’s the connections between the disparate components that make “Identical Mattress Completely different Desires” succeed so powerfully but enigmatically.

Park, a founding editor of the Believer, fills the caverns of his dizzying and intoxicating novel with echoes upon echoes. Characters each actual and imagined recur all through, generally displaying up below aliases. Wildword, the title of a writing program in Quickly’s story, seems later because the title of a psychological train much like free writing. The initials KPG pop up quite a few occasions. These reverberations guarantee the reader that wildly completely different occasions include connections that may finally be elucidated.

For all its originality and effectiveness, “Identical Mattress Completely different Desires” shares its method with quite a few equally formidable works — Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” Namwali Serpell’s “The Previous Drift,” David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” and Jennifer Egan’s “A Go to from the Goon Squad,” to call however a couple of. All of them juxtapose a number of narratives vastly separated by time and cleanly distinguished by kind, mixing futuristic sci-fi or lighthearted comedy with the brutal vagaries of historical past.

“What’s historical past?” the novel asks repeatedly, and although some solutions are offered, no definition is passable. However Park, who challenges our ignorance of Korea’s historical past, reveals how a nation includes greater than geography, greater than authorities practices, greater than no matter title is bestowed upon it. A nation exists within the hearts of those that consider in its vitality and who struggle for its sovereignty. Historical past ought to work the identical manner.

Clark is the creator of “An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom” and “Skateboard.”