Review: Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
Beneath the continental umbrella of American Fiction, there is a type of novel that continues to sustain our literary appetite. Fiction that explores not one theme but like a zillion, featuring a plot that relay races the narrative voice between a cast of colorful characters and a structure that despite being mulled over endlessly by the novelist, (imagine a cork board with lots of yarn) resembles a formation as naturally divine as one found in microbiology.
These books go by many names: system novels, maximalist fiction, big books. The usual suspects appear, you know their names: Gilliam Waddis, Phomas Tynchon, Don DeLillo. While this type of fiction is not exclusive to America, I think it excels here. We are a nation with so many different perspectives. Whether it be geographical, cultural or historical.
But What is history?
This is the first line of Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams, a book which triumphantly plants a flag alongside its system novel comrades while also providing an emotionally moving narrative. The plot is joyfully complicated, it begins with the gentle comedy of a boozy reunion among old friends, introducing a ton of characters in a short span of time, many of whom are later revealed to be of great importance. The opening serves as a satire of the publishing world and how commercial interests pigeonhole Asian American artists. When the narrator, Soon Sheen, accidentally takes home an unpublished manuscript called Same Bed, Different Dreams (notice the comma), the mystery unfurls in earnest.
From this point forward, Park takes the reader on a ride through the events leading up to and following the Korean War. He plays with fact and fiction, crafting his idiosyncratic and epic novel. We learn about the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), an organization working in the shadows for a unified Korea. Historical figures such as KPG president Syngman Rhee interweave with those of pop culture such as Marylin Monroe, Harold Lloyd and even the fictional henchman Oddjob. Each of these threads conclude with the figures in question becoming inducted as honorary members of the KPG. Park gets a lot of usage from this acronym and the novel is chock full of wordplay. However, none of this is cleverness for its own sake. There is a motif regarding the Westernization of traditional Korean names which pays off to devastating effect at the novel’s climax.
While Korea looms large in the foreground, I’d like to give special mention to the novel’s tender portrayal of Buffalo, NY. Buffalo is to Ed Park as Dublin is to Joyce or Newark is to Philip Roth. From scouring the odds and ends of history, Park presents this overlooked city as a major battleground for Korean independence. Living in Buffalo is Parker Jotter, a Kilgore Trout like figure, whose pulpy sci-fi novels form the basis of an entire mythology and later, a technocratic oligarchy. Jotter, Sheen and the rest of the ensemble serve as cyphers for this complex and hilarious literary puzzle.
The narrative spans from the end of the 19th century, through the 20th and into the 21st. Not chronologically of course! Oh goodness no. Like any good modernist, Park’s narrators bounce around the timeline like children on a trampoline. Ed Park has even implied during interviews (and once in my DM’s) that the 18 chapters in Same Bed Different Dreams are a wink+nudge to Joyce’s 18 episodes in Ulysses. Over the course of these 18 chapters, Park structures the novel into three distinct narrative voices. The first is of Soon Sheen, the fiction writer who comes into possession of the SBDD manuscript. His sections are told from the first person and have a casual auto-fiction quality. These chapters are set in 2016, the novel’s present day. The second voice is mostly told in third person and follows Parker Jotter. The time period jumps around from the 1950s up through the 1990s and early 2000s. Many of these chapters are tinged with a sense of melancholy and nostalgia. Lastly, there are the Dreams. These are the chapters where Ed Park’s imagination soars as he chronicles the history of the KPG and its clandestine members. The narration is disconnected from any singular character. This is where the Pynchon and DeLillo comparisons carry the most credibility. Not because the tone of voice is derivative but because Park is tuned into this once forgotten frequency (The Freak as Jotter calls it). It is the same strain of literary voice found in lines like “A screaming comes across the sky” or “He speaks in your voice, American…”. It is omniscient, doom-laden and carrying the weight of all future events.
I could go on and on about Same Bed Different Dreams, maybe someday I will. But since it is a recent release, I urge my friends and colleagues to pick up a copy for themselves, give it a whirl.
Welcome to the KPG.
