Overqualified (ECW, 2009)
a novel (sort of) by Joey Comeau
Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is September’s Book of the Month because it is what we’re all looking for, or at least what I am: something new, fresh, different, that works. People use the term “very original” too freely. They waste it as a descriptor. Overqualified, however, really is “very original,” because it is unprecedented.
Overqualified is a novel written in the form of one- to two-page cover letters to various establishments — from New York Times to Xerox Canada — but details of the main character’s life and mental dilemmas often trickle into these letters, most notably about his brother Adrian, who has been hit by a drunk driver, and his girlfriend Susan, who he loves, “honestly,” even though he occasionally panics that she’s the last girl he’ll ever love and … “be with.” Recollections of what he and his brother used to do slip into these cover letters, or, more crassly, stories of what he’d like to do to a girl other than Susan, and these are funny and occasionally piercingly sad divergences from why he is the best candidate for the job to which he is applying. He tells Absolut Vodka, “My brother and I used to fight to the death on the top of barns … [and] made up characters for ourselves. We hummed our own fight music.”
He tells Paramount Pictures he wants to write horror movies because he watched Pet Cemetery four times before he ever “saw more than a flash of the dead guy,” but that he likes being scared. That he and his brother Adrian used to go out to their grandparents’ barn with flash lights, and one of them sit outside while the other would go in without his flashlight and see how long he could stand in there alone in the black room. “It wasn’t the sort of game where anyone won or lost,” he tells Paramount, “I want to write horror movies that scare you, but leave you with the feeling that your brother is right outside the door, waiting.”
These memories of the brother are cleverly structured, potent, and well-written. But the book is in no way sombre for any period of time. Overall, it is offkilter and amusing; hilarious in parts with perfectly placed ridiculous moments. The honesty is often as funny as it is sad, like when he tells New York Times, “A stint in juvenile hall adds a much needed bit of excitement to a childhood I can barely remember.” He tells the Park Lane Mall he is the ideal candidate for the Santa Claus position because his hating kids means he isn’t a pervert, and that when he worked at the Mattel toy company, he hired people of “small stature” and designed a new uniform for them of “green slippers and ridiculous hats” and made people sing as they worked until he was fired on three counts of racism towards Irish midgets he allegedly referred to as “my north pole leprechauns.”
And he’s a visionary, this guy. “Dear Gillette, do you remember when you were the best a man could get? … you need to get back to your roots, Gillette … bring back the straight razor. That was a product … You want Gillette razors against a businessman’s throat in an alley. Gillette razors hidden in the mouths of inmates.”
If not overqualified on some of his cover letters, he is often humourously over-confident: “Dear Parker Brothers … I have never designed a board game before, but I think I’d be good at it. You roll the dice and make your move. How hard can that be?”
And he has a tendency to get amusingly off topic, as in his cover letter to Irving Oil, “I want to get drunk in a bar and take a pool cue and fuck up a dude with a scar down the side of his face,” or telling HBO why he is the man for the boxing show because, “I don’t make collect calls, I make the operator pay.”
All gags aside, Comeau is a good, solid writer. He knows what detail can do. And the book is funny, a pleasure to read, a lesson in innovation, a laugh-out-loud stab North America, and an occasionally unexpected heartbreaker. It is a book for everyone with an iota of life in them.
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