(A few times a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today? Personal Days, Ed Park’s debut novel.

Where’d you go? Peso’s, on lower Queen Anne.

What’d you eat? The crab and avocado melt on open-faced English muffins ($11.75.)

How was the food? The reviewers on our review page are less than kind to Peso’s, and I can understand why. It’s kind of a young urban professionals meat-market. I’ve gone there twice at night—I had a friend who liked the staff—and it was a miserable experience, unless your ideal bar experience calls for endless shots. But the food, when I go for breakfast or lunch or happy hour, is usually good. And the crab melt was terrific. Though the motherfucker sure was rich: whole pieces of real crab and just-right avocado with cheese and a mound of fries, along with a mayo-chipotle dipping sauce. I’m just about set for the day, food-wise, I reckon. The server was polite and quick. I could’ve done without the classic rock soundtrack—for me, eating to the dulcet tones of Boston is slightly more appealing than eating a four-course meal in a bathroom—but I’d definitely come back for a fancy lunch.


What does your date say about itself? Park was a founding member of The Believer. It’s about workers in an office who are starting to get fired with a terrifying frequency. There is a blurb from Helen DeWitt, the brilliant author who wrote The Last Samurai (no relation to the awful Tom Cruise movie), which was one of the best debuts of the last ten years: “With Personal Days, Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular.” I’ve never seen a blurb by DeWitt before. People in the book business refer to Park writing a lot of Nabokovian wordplay, also.

Is there a representative quote? “Laars looks gaunt these days, his floppy hair hanging limp around his temples…He confesses to spending his evenings nursing Scotch before his computer at home, Googling himself until the wee hours. There’s a person out there who shares the same name, incredibly enough. Person or persons. He’s found himself in Appalachian hiking e-gazettes, antique typewriter societies, and University of Alaska alumni newsletters. I must destroy him, he says…No doubt he’s Googled everyone in the office, uncovering secrets nestled in the thirty-fifth screen of results. Jack II says that when you feel a tingling in your fingers, it means someone’s Googling you. We take to this bit of instant folklore immediately.”

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. If you told me two weeks ago that I’d love a second book set in an office written in the first person plural this year, after Then We Came To the End, by Joshua Ferris, I would have slapped you in the face and called you Sally. But I do love it. (It helps that I’ve heard that it doesn’t keep up with the “we” narrator all the way through.) Park is coming to town on the 16th, and this is very exciting. I can’t wait to leave here tonight so I can finish the book.