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Overqualified

by Joey Comeau

Toronto writer Joey Comeau’s second novel consists of 40 job application cover letters, each addressed to a different potential employer and signed with the novelist’s own name. Though his desire for gainful employment may be sincere, in these letters Comeau clearly does not really intend to persuade anyone that he is the best candidate for the job.

Each letter rapidly digresses into something more akin to a diary entry than a professional missive. There is speculation as to humanity’s future, reminiscences from the narrator’s childhood, confessions of vulnerability and of sexual desire, all punctuated by vitriolic humour and unsettling instances of violence.

There is much frustration in these letters – born of capitalism’s absurdities and of personal calamities – but there is also humour, compassion, and joy. In the background are references to the narrator’s punk rock mother, his Acadian grandparents, his ill-fated romances, and a younger brother killed by a drunk driver.

Together, these letters question the nature of sincerity, revealing something of the narrator’s fixations in the process. The Internet is one of these fixations, and the jarring directness of the prose suggests that this medium has had a significant influence on Comeau’s style.

The letters are most successful when they concern the narrator more than the addressee. “Dear Samsonite,” for example, eschews the application conceit altogether, launching into an account of an old suitcase found in a basement. Inside, the narrator discovers a ladder leading downward to a series of chambers containing dead relatives and pets. He encounters his grandfather drinking wine and watching wrestling on TV, his great aunt sewing a pumpkin costume, and his younger brother, Adrian, playing Mortal Kombat on Nintendo.

The bittersweet humour of such scenes is much more satisfying than the rancour of critiques addressed to the likes of Irving Oil or the Linguistics Department of the University of Victoria. A reader’s enjoyment of Overqualified depends upon the degree to which she can stomach Comeau’s bouts of animosity and appreciate his attempts to locate meaning in an existence that is perpetually surprising and absurd.

 

Reviewer: Devon Code

Publisher: ECW Press

DETAILS

Price: $14.95

Page Count: 96 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-55022-858-7

Released: April

Issue Date: 2009-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels