Book Review: ‘Same Bed Different Dreams,’ by Ed Park

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS, by Ed Park

Just after I’d registered for my first semester of college courses, I was meandering among a concourse of clubs and teams, fending off their grinning ambassadors, when a newspaper headline caught my eye: “U.S. Says Soviet Downed Korean Airliner; 269 Lost.” By today’s standards the KAL 007 tragedy seems like a distant relic of Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric, but at the time it was a Cold War grenade: Jet fighters scrambled, sabers rattled, tinfoil-hat theories spiked. Late in his lush, labyrinthine “Same Bed Different Dreams,” Ed Park recreates that moment, twisting the doomed flight’s number into a James Bond motif that resonates throughout the novel. Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s: If Park’s suitcase is stuffed, well, it’s an inspired choice for an odyssey that unpacks, in Pynchonesque fashion, Korean history and American paranoia.

Soon Sheen is an erstwhile Korean American writer turned lackey for GLOAT, a technology conglomerate. “I wasn’t clear on what the letters in GLOAT signified,” he tells us. “Possibly nothing. Or else many things: the phrase in question ever changing, apt for a company based on change. (‘Good luck on all that,’ we’d say to each other, at least once a week.)” Soon’s duties include inventing acronyms for marketing algorithms, from NCD (“Nicely Compensated Drudge”) to AWAM (“And what about me?”) to GUMS (“Great Unfinishable Masterpiece Syndrome”). Park revels in puns and “wanton wordplay.”

In 2016 Soon joins a rowdy publishing dinner at a Manhattan restaurant, where, under the influence of alcohol, he accidentally swipes “Same Bed, Different Dreams,” a translated manuscript by the Korean literary “enfant terrible” Echo (a pen name). “Same Bed, Different Dreams” maps the arc of the mysterious Korean Provisional Government (or K.P.G.), an actual network founded in 1919 and then scattered abroad, fading out post-World War II. (Park’s novel and Echo’s nonfiction novel share a title, based on a Korean proverb and helpfully demarcated by Echo’s comma, the punctuation a possible allusion to the 38th parallel.)

Back home in the suburb of Dogskill, a hung-over Soon realizes his mistake after his dog has ripped apart the manuscript, burying installments until digging them up for his master, bones from the past. Soon pores over the tattered pages, or “dreams”: K.P.G. has somehow thrived amid darkened offices and abandoned apartments, striving for reunification of North and South.