“Same Bed Different Dreams” loosely braids three main strands. One arc, “The Sins,” takes place in a lightly speculative near future: It’s narrated by Soon Sheen, a fiction writer who long ago fled for a job at an amorphous tech giant called GLOAT, and into domestic life with his wife and daughter. (He also has a dog who — in a spackled-on postmodern touch — suffers from a terminal condition that causes him to tear apart texts and bury them.) Coaxed by a friend into attending a publishing party in Manhattan, Soon picks up — perhaps accidentally — a manuscript by a South Korean literary legend known as Echo.
That manuscript forms the second arc: Titled “Same Bed, Different Dreams” — with a comma, unlike the novel in which it appears — it claims to be “a true account of the Korean Provisional Government.” Though the real KPG is conventionally understood to have been a basically symbolic resistance group, formed in 1919 and gone by mid-century, the manuscript asserts that the government in exile operates to this day, striving for a free and united Korea. In short numbered scenes, these sections of the book take us through an alternate history of the peninsula and the KPG’s shadowy efforts.
The third arc, “2333,” acts as the novel’s odds and ends drawer. Loosely speaking, it follows the life and literary afterlife of Parker Jotter, a Black fighter pilot who writes pulp space adventure novels inspired by his time in the Korean War. His output — including the unpublished finale of the “2333” series and “Wildwording,” his creative how-to guide — attracts attention from all kinds of sinister forces, corporate, national and academic.
Over some 500 pages, these three strands split into further threads, which tangle up in strange ways. People marry, divorce, have affairs. Political figures show up under Anglicized names or straight-up pseudonyms. Authors, editors and patrons disguise their identities and ethnic backgrounds.
In this sandbox, Park experiments with ideas about history’s movements and transmissions, playing with the ways that pop culture mediates our access to the past. He’s especially interested in how Hollywood fictions such as “M.A.S.H.” and “Inchon!” can come to feel more vital and familiar than factual events. These projects can also open portals back into history: The conditions of their production reveal them to be political artifacts, sometimes overt (funded as propaganda), sometimes accidental (making Ronald Reagan famous). In the end, we — especially immigrants and their descendants — inherit a poignantly motley assortment of stuff, which we turn into parables about our place in the world.
Like Don DeLillo, Park is drawn to conspiracy as a political and creative force. The paranoid style pulls in scattered, distant events, insisting that they are only superficially random. Coincidence turns out to be the off-gassing of plot, in both senses of the word. What better setting to test the limits of that style than Korea, which on a map “resembles a rabbit held by the ears, waiting for a chance to skip away,” variously preyed on by Japan, the United States, China and Russia? Between the colonizers and their opposition, the country is a hotbed for scheming. Imperialism and the Cold War create strange bedfellows: The Washington Times is descended from the Moonies; Seoul hosts Marilyn Monroe’s most famous live performance. This is the rare work of fiction whose spell only grows stronger if you Google; the warren of hyperlinks and disputed Wikipedia stubs make this imagined world feel queasily continuous with our own.
“Same Bed Different Dreams” is a supremely cool novel. Park commands an eye-popping array of cultural references: hockey and Hollywood; avant-garde literature and ’70s pulp; the internal grammar of corporate life and great board games. Also in the mix is a far rarer and more volatile element — racial humor. His approach is casually adroit, dealing in surprising inversions and good-natured parody. (My favorite coinage is AAWCWA, short for Asian American Watchdog and Creative Writers’ Association, pronounced “awkward.”) The prose moves through the material like an Olympic diver slicing into the water, swift and splashless. Its prevailing tone, familiar from Park’s 2008 workplace comedy, “Personal Days,” is elegant, a little arch, with titrated moments of loveliness. In a typical exchange, Sin fends off a younger co-worker, Loa Ding, who wants him to join an Asian American mentoring program, “Tell It Slant”:
“Not crazy about that name.”
“It’s from Emily Dickinson.”
Am I a buzzkill for wishing this novel were more than cool? It can come across as too neat. Even the loose ends of plot — for example, a late-breaking twist about Soon’s wife — feel studiously nonchalant, like reattaching the original hems on a pair of tailored jeans. What is all this artfulness covering for? You sense, throughout, a refusal to commit. Park seems ambivalent about the kind of totalizing systems novels put forward by DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, yet unwilling to surrender to a vision of history as random, incomprehensible, inevitably incomplete. It’s likely that he finds grand narratives implausible, ideologically suspect or maybe just trite. But absent some deeper conviction at its core, the novel can’t quite reach escape velocity; it ends up stuck in uneasy orbit around the theories he discards.
This wary, cagey quality can also be understood as an evasive maneuver — a tactic to avoid being flattened by representational politics. As cultural institutions eagerly enlist writers in various corrective projects — filling gaps, forging counternarratives, giving voice to the silenced — the historical novel is especially hot right now. The genre takes up 80 percent of the novels by non-White authors most often cited by university syllabi and awards’ shortlists, observes scholar Alexander Manshel in his new book, “Writing Backwards.” Colson Whitehead, Justin Torres, Tania James, Tommy Orange — more and more of our literary lights being borne back, apparently ceaselessly, into the past. This presents a fraught prospect for the novelist of color: After all, doesn’t everyone want to be canonized? But also: Does anyone, in their heart of hearts, want to be primarily thought of as “teachable”?
Then again, “Same Bed Different Dreams” has a special fondness for bad readers — naive, fanatical, brewing rich meaning from the barest bones. Parker’s wife, Flora, is so desperate to make sense of the newspaper, she joins the Unification Church to find answers. A psychologist in Buffalo is convinced the “2333” series contains coded references to Korean politics. Conspiracy becomes, touchingly, an oddly inclusive force, pulling everyone into the story. And diaspora, the novel suggests, makes paranoiacs of us all, always searching for signs. On the GLOAT listserv /koreana, which Soon complains about but can’t quit, members declare the hidden Korean origins of everything including sushi and ukiyo-e. The fictional KPG claims novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, silent film star Harold Lloyd and presidential assassin Leon Czolgosz, among many others, as members. Park’s best trick is to reverse the current of assimilation: Typically, minorities are viewed as a fun pop of color in the American tapestry; here, everyone gets recruited into some role in the fate of Korea, a country at one time renamed (in a coincidental cross-language homonym) “Chosen” by its Japanese conquerors.
Switching fluidly between genres — multigenerational family saga; spy thriller; comedy of manners — the novel unspools like a dazzling demo reel. Other critics have described “Same Bed Different Dreams” as feeling like a debut because of its inventive flair. But maybe it’s more that the dominant impression is of latent potential. Even with these pages practically warm from the printer, we’re impatient to see what Park does next. Reading this novel is like getting a prime seat at an exhibition match. The range on display is exhilarating. And it makes you wonder: What would happen if he played for keeps?
