BETO ALVAREZ

What's Inside 'Notes' a tribute to its author's centeredness 'The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage' – when Abe met Mary Pick of the week Local scribes Signings, etc. More Books

'In the caravanserai all was bustle and hum,” begins an evocative central passage in the adventurous “The Enchantress of Florence.” Workers and planners, blacksmiths and carpenters industriously go about their jobs to keep up trade and transit between the East and the West, as do turbaned coolies in red shirts and dhotis who run “ceaselessly hither and yon with bundles of improbable size and weight” upon their heads, while animals run wild, including screechy monkeys and shrieking parrots exploding like “green fireworks in the sky.”

Office drones of the world, your day has come. Your “Germinal” has arrived. In the tradition of coal-mine reformist Emile Zola, novelist Ed Park has turned a critical eye toward the inhumane conditions in the typical 21st-century cubicle farm.