Last February I was at a bookselling event on the west coast, in a slightly-too-dark ballroom amid the din of hundreds of colleagues all seeing each other for the first time since before the pandemic. An old friend approached me with an unassuming author at her side. She had early copies of the author’s novel—his first in more than a decade—and pushed one at me with an urgency that made me hold tight to the unadorned manuscript all the way back to Vermont, even though she hadn’t told me much of anything about it, and it wasn’t exactly a short book. It seemed important somehow.
Strangely enough, this is kind of how that book, Ed Park’s masterful *Same Bed Different Dreams—*unequivocally the best piece of fiction I read this past year—actually begins: with a writer, lately working for a tech monolith with shadowy aims (you know the type), being invited to a dinner hosted by a small publisher in the city. He hasn’t published anything in years—not since a largely forgotten story collection—and he’s mostly moved on from fiction, living with his wife and young daughter near his company’s campus upstate. But tonight, as a favor to a friend, he makes an appearance to celebrate the forthcoming US release of book by a reclusive avant-garde writer from South Korea (an aside: I have attended my fair share of dinners put on by small presses, and Park nails the feel of such an evening). A few generations of writers and artists from the Korean diaspora have gathered: mentors, proteges, old crushes, and rivals. Libations start flowing. Things get weird. Back on Metro-North a few hours later, our hero realizes he has a manuscript in his bag. It’s not the book being fêted back at the restaurant; it’s a different novel by the same writer. Rougher. Stranger. Unfinished.
I say “our hero,” but, in fact, Soon Sheen, the erstwhile writer-turned-techie, is but one of dozens of richly-drawn characters who play a part—some large, some small, all essential—in the saga that follows. Among them: Thomas Ahn, Korean freedom fighter at the turn of the 20th Century; mysterious artist Mercy Pang; Syngman Rhee, the first president of modern South Korea; Parker Jotter, a pulp science fiction writer and electronics repairman in 1950s Buffalo reckoning with his experiences during the Korean War; and William McKinley, Emma Goldman, Tim Horton, Ronald Reagan and a large chunk of the cast of the Friday the 13th movie franchise.
I won’t bother tripping all over myself trying to illustrate how each of these figures—some of whom are fictional, others historical—connect, or how any of it links back to that unfinished manuscript in Soon’s bag. Suffice to say this: At the heart of Same Bed, Different Dreams is the Korean Provisional Government, established under occupation in the early 1900s and devoted to a united, independent Korea. The KPG works tirelessly and unseen to achieve its goals, across history, across time, and across space. It claims as its members poets, anarchists, movie stars, tyrants, video game designers, people from ancient history, and people who have yet to be born. Each of the characters I just named, alongside many others, plays a part in the KPG’s story.
I’m not exaggerating even a bit when I say I believe Same Bed, Different Dreams is a masterpiece. It’s both staggeringly complex and compulsively readable, eminently satisfying but beguiling in all the right ways. A few novels are comparable—David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, Thomas Pynchon’s *Gravity’s Rainbow—*but this one is in a class all its own.
I knew there was something special about this book from the moment it was put into my hands, and I’m awfully glad I took the chance on it. And if you like the kind of speculative novel that manages to be both epic and intricate, the kind that keeps you thinking about it for days after it’s finished, you’ll want to take a chance on it, too.
Sam and Emma Kaas own and run the Norwich Bookstore.