SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS, by Ed Park

Just after I’d registered for my first semester of college courses, I was meandering among a concourse of clubs and teams, fending off their grinning ambassadors, when a newspaper headline caught my eye: “U.S. Says Soviet Downed Korean Airliner; 269 Lost.” By today’s standards the KAL 007 tragedy seems like a distant relic of Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric, but at the time it was a Cold War grenade: Jet fighters scrambled, sabers rattled, tinfoil-hat theories spiked. Late in his lush, labyrinthine “Same Bed Different Dreams,” Ed Park recreates that moment, twisting the doomed flight’s number into a James Bond motif that resonates throughout the novel. Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s: If Park’s suitcase is stuffed, well, it’s an inspired choice for an odyssey that unpacks, in Pynchonesque fashion, Korean history and American paranoia.

Soon Sheen is an erstwhile Korean American writer turned lackey for GLOAT, a technology conglomerate. “I wasn’t clear on what the letters in GLOAT signified,” he tells us. “Possibly nothing. Or else many things: the phrase in question ever changing, apt for a company based on change. (‘Good luck on all that,’ we’d say to each other, at least once a week.)” Soon’s duties include inventing acronyms for marketing algorithms, from NCD (“Nicely Compensated Drudge”) to AWAM (“And what about me?”) to GUMS (“Great Unfinishable Masterpiece Syndrome”). Park revels in puns and “wanton wordplay.”

In 2016 Soon joins a rowdy publishing dinner at a Manhattan restaurant, where, under the influence of alcohol, he accidentally swipes “Same Bed, Different Dreams,” a translated manuscript by the Korean literary “enfant terrible” Echo (a pen name). “Same Bed, Different Dreams” maps the arc of the mysterious Korean Provisional Government (or K.P.G.), an actual network founded in 1919 and then scattered abroad, fading out post-World War II. (Park’s novel and Echo’s nonfiction novel share a title, based on a Korean proverb and helpfully demarcated by Echo’s comma, the punctuation a possible allusion to the 38th parallel.)

Back home in the suburb of Dogskill, a hung-over Soon realizes his mistake after his dog has ripped apart the manuscript, burying installments until digging them up for his master, bones from the past. Soon pores over the tattered pages, or “dreams”: K.P.G. has somehow thrived amid darkened offices and abandoned apartments, striving for reunification of North and South.

Then there’s Parker Jotter, a Black veteran shot down over MIG Alley during the Korean War and later rescued from a P.O.W. camp. Convinced he saw a massive spacecraft in midair, he discharges to Buffalo, where he sells electronics by day and scribbles by night: a series of science fiction novels known collectively as “2333.” Fans revere “2333” as a pulp classic, although Jotter never finished his sixth (and final) volume before his death in 1993. Park rounds out his cast with Soon’s wife, Nora You, a nail salon mogul; their adopted white daughter, Story; Monk Zingapan, a gamer-cum-writing-coach; and sundry alums of Vermont’s Penumbra College.

Penumbra, Story, Echo, Dogskill: Park’s allegory moves along multiple tracks. “Same Bed Different Dreams” demands that we surrender to its energy and go with the flow when we don’t quite know where we’re going. It’s a challenging read and yet wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches; will one slip his agile hands? Park seeks to encompass the vast Korean diaspora, but he’s also fleeing realism, a personal diaspora, away from conventional forms. His totems propel us forward: an underground cell whose members have nine fingers; the dawn of A.I.; hockey lore; a Zippo lighter; the lines and circles of Korean script. (There’s even a minor character named Totem, Park’s wink to his technique.) The satire comes at us fast and thick, but is this Rube Goldberg contraption too clever by half?

Not for this reader. “Same Bed Different Dreams” struts confidently across registers — lyrical, deadpan, acerbic, comedic — while doling out clues. Characters rotate in and out, some glimpsed in passing, their motives opaque. Real-life figures linger on the margins; Park writes of the anarchist Emma Goldman: “With her pince-nez she resembles a small, clean old man, barely clearing the podium, but she is the most appealing woman he’s ever seen. Light glints off the lenses, mesmerizing as she talks, her voice like an auctioneer’s.” He splices in brilliant set pieces: the assassination of William McKinley; the origin of the “Friday the 13th” franchise; the tormented career of South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee; and the Forgotten War itself, rife with bloody corpses and political miscalculation. The book’s many elements fall into place.

Park homes in on Inky Sin, Jotter’s Buffalo psychiatrist, who boards KAL 007 en route to a medical conference in Seoul, accompanied by his wife. (The trip’s a front for more K.P.G. skulduggery.) The Sins leave behind a troubled teenage son, stranded in a Nebraska reform school; he may hold the key that unlocks “Same Bed, Different Dreams.” Like Lewis Carroll or David Lynch, Park mulls obsessively over dreams, those flimsy portals onto other lives and logics. Myths and identities jumble and morph into something new; the cool factor hits with the force of “The Crying of Lot 49” or Justin Torres’s recent “Blackouts.”

True to the spirit of “2333,” 2023 has been a banner year for experimental literature that delves audaciously into the senseless agonies of our own age. As Echo’s manuscript observes of the science fiction titan Philip K. Dick: “In his hands, the real world turns out to be a simulacrum, or a hallucination, or a shimmering entertainment meant for someone else. In story after story he lays out the true, secret nature of American society — drab on the outside, garbled and haunted within.” The same can be said of Park’s sprawling, stunning novel.

Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of “This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS | By Ed Park | Random House | 544 pp. | $30