E-book Evaluation
An Oral Historical past of Atlantis: Tales
By Ed ParkRandom Home: 224 pages, $28If you purchase books linked on our website, The Instances might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist unbiased bookstores.
Realism should command the heights of American fiction, however insurgents are in it to win it. With titans similar to Pynchon and DeLillo of their late 80s, now comes a era captained by Ed Park, whose capacious, zany “Same Bed Different Dreams” gained the Los Angeles Instances fiction prize and was a Pulitzer finalist. Park samples lots of that novel’s methods in his new story assortment, “An Oral History of Atlantis,” creating his personal model of Dada. Watch carefully for patterns, although: movies, starting from pulp motion pictures to Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”; know-how, from laptop computer passwords to algorithm fails; politics, from class warfare to the Korean battle; intercourse, from hormone-crazed youngsters to a gaggle of lesbians; and metafiction, from Vonnegut to John Barth. If there’s a pea (or extra) of genius hidden amid the walnut shells he’s shuffling throughout the ebook, it’s on us to search out it.
“A Note to My Translator” serves as a preface: An acclaimed writer, Hans de Krap, blasts E.’s egregious translation slip-ups. “Only 10 pages into my novel and already all seems lost,” he rants. “I no longer recognize characters, points of plot, dialogue. … Can you help me? Please?” De Krap isn’t simply stuffed with crap; that is Park’s attraction to his readers, drawing us into the gathering’s linked items.
“Machine City” presents clues to his methodology — intersections between easy narrative and experimentation — as a middle-aged man remembers a task in a Yale scholar movie. First revealed within the New Yorker, “The Wife on Ambien” is a fragmentary, oddly compelling riff on marriage. “An Accurate Account,” composed as a letter, urges us to query its accuracy. Park contains references to “Same Bed Different Dreams”: Penumbra Faculty, as an example, seems in each books.
After the ornate sprawl of the novel, he revels within the shorter type, a palpable pleasure on the web page. Irony has by no means had it so good.
He showcases figures with mysterious agendas, similar to “Seven Women’s” Hannah Hahn, an enigmatic editor of a ‘90s East Village magazine. Midway through the story, the narrator reveals herself as the queer Miriam, who also recounts “Watch Your Step,” an edgy espionage tale set in Seoul and addressed to Chung — like Miriam, a spy, but a bumbling liability to their network. Both are Korean Americans who’d met in a theater-arts course in faculty, together with the sinister Johnny Oh, who’s presumably a spy, too. This drama is not going to finish nicely: “Watch Your Step” has a coiled power, a cobra poised to strike.
Ditto for “Weird Menace”: Two Hollywood has-beens sip “itty-bitty drinklets” whereas screening a low-budget sci-fi DVD they’d shot in 1984. Neither have seen it in many years, but they’ve reunited for a web-based viewing as followers of the cult basic comply with at residence. The story is pure dialogue between the star, Child, and director, Toner: They’ve forgotten a lot of the plot and tipsily put it collectively. Park codecs their banter in left and proper margins with loads of clean area, a visible back-and-forth that enhances spontaneity, a way of unease. As Toner observes, “Meteors are metaphors, at some level.” Hannah makes a cameo, and a producer, Tina, shoves notes in Child’s face, nudging the drunken actor towards a grim conclusion.
Park’s not detached to normie issues, similar to household tensions and floundering careers, communities and their discontents. His forays into realism repay. In “The Air as Air,” Sidney, a vet maimed in Iraq, belongs to a restoration motion targeted on breath. He agrees to satisfy his distant, macho father at a lodge close to a California seaside, a touch of lovely prose: “The breeze freed fat drops from the trees as I walked from the parking lot to the turquoise hotel. Around a corner, a worker was standing by a ladder while another worker, unseen, narrated something in Spanish from the roof. Little green lizards and red crabs bright as poker chips scurried from my path,” the writer writes. “I looked to the water. … No boats were out, and the ocean looked tight as cellophane.”
Principally, Park challenges us to maintain up: “The idea of unstable reality would be reflected in the form of the piece,” one character opines. The gathering is like an elaborate crossword puzzle designed by Borges. “Slide to Unlock” employs second particular person because the protagonist sees his life flash earlier than his eyes. Fritz, Hannah’s ex-husband, is actually dropping his face, a conceit Park develops elsewhere in “An Oral History of Atlantis,” recalling Mariana Enriquez’s “Face of Disgrace.”
He invokes the mythological trope of the floating island (additionally an allusion to Atlantis) in “Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts”: 18 girls named Tina labor on an archaeological dig within the Pacific, funded by a shadowy basis. There’s British Tina, Pageboy Tina, French Manicure Tina, Tina with the scorpion tattoo, even the Anti-Tina, a little bit of enjoyable tucked amongst Park’s coded riddles. The Tinas argue as they decipher an historic script. A couple of wish to escape the island. Is Gerwig accessible to direct the movie model?
And is “An Oral History of Atlantis” a code-breaker or deal-breaker for readers? What are we to make of Park’s fusion of comedy and hazard, his puns and wordplay and arcane theories? He’s testing our endurance for wonderful causes: We’re complicit in his fiction, perpetrators on the scene of against the law, the act of studying a jumble of synapses in our brains, spinning in all instructions like a twig of bullets.
“Everything could mean anything, as well as its opposite,” Park writes in his story of the Tinas, a gesture to his craft. “You had to pick which side of the contradiction to embrace, or else record the whole unholy snarl itself.”
Cain is a ebook critic and the writer of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
