By S.P. MacIntyre Jul 20, 2009, 0:28 GMT
When you open Overqualified, the new novella by Joey Comeau, to the first (actually, seventh) page, this is what you get:
In this way, Overqualified is more like Mark Dunn’s Ibid: A Life, which was written as a series of footnotes to an absent (i.e. destroyed by bathwater) text, but with fewer puns. The organizing principle for both texts is the same: convey a story through subtle brushstrokes embedded in seemingly tangential material.
“Dear Irving Oil,
“I am writing to apply for a job with your company, and I have included my resume for your review. You will find that every reference and each previous job will check out as valid, but I think that it’s important to be honest: my assigned mission is to take you down, from the inside.”
This is a story written as a series of cover letters to companies, based on humorous cover letters he actually sent to companies and made available online, here: http://asofterworld.com/oqindex.php
Rather than just be an anthology of humorous vignettes initially published on the internet, like Bob Powers’ Happy Cruelty Day, Comeau took the humorous original material and reshaped it, molding these comedic one-shots into a narrative that unveils itself gradually over the course of the book’s approximately 40 letters. Little slivers of story rise to the surface of the text: a dead brother, a failing relationship, a man’s descent into the madness of memory. The story of a character also named Joey Comeau.
And over the course of this story’s revelation, what do you get? A sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-crushingly sad romp through a man’s swelling nihilism and disenchantment. Many of these themes and tendencies bring a pang of recognition to those that have read his other novella, Lockpick Pornography, and his collection of short stories, It’s Too Late to Say I’m Sorry. The letters in Overqualified are ridiculous and irreverent in the beginning, but get increasingly heartbreaking and bizarre as Joey’s (the character) life unravels.
But this could be a problem: the story begins with the fictional Joey Comeau sending out crazy letters and continues with him sending crazy letters throughout; there is no initial stability, no fall from “normalcy,” no indication that these absurd cover letters were sent for any other reason than to be funny for a reader and catharsis for the “author” (the fictional author of the letters). My question is one of impetus: why would a sibling’s accidental death be the precipitating event for a cover letter that portrays the applicant as a saboteur from the future, or as someone that wants to write cards for Hallmark celebrating “International Stalker Day,” or as someone that wants to turn organ transplantation into an assembly line process?
The answer is, of course, because people are irrational, and broken, and lonely, and eccentric. And this book is trying to capture these parts, these gritty bits that want to pick locks and fight on rooftops, the funny idiosyncrasies many of us have when it comes to sex or even the ordinary things like watching television with your grandfather.
This book is very much about nostalgia for a past of exaggerated quirks and curious beauty. So many of us are compelled to believe these things are on the fringes, are odd and unordinary, but this little novella, much like Miranda July or David Eggers’ stories, tries to portray these things unashamedly, as “something that feels perfect and correct.”
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