PERSONAL DAYS

PERSONAL DAYS BY ED PARK NEW YORK: RANDOM HOUSE. 256 PAGES. $13.

A debut novel, set in a midsize metropolitan office, using a first-personplural narrator to capture the collective consciousness of an amorphous workplace we: It's difficult to avoid comparisons between Ed Park's Personal Days and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End. Both books attempt to strike a balance between humor and sympathy, between the indignities of midlevel white-collardom and the quiet nobility of showing up every day to do your job. Under the shared influence of Don DeLiIIo, both apply his signature mixture of uneasy cross talk, misinformation, and paranoia to a period of seemingly random corporate …