Rating
3.5

Holden Caulfield once said in The Catcher in the Rye, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish that the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

Joey Comeau is that type of author.

Image courtesy of amazon.com

In his latest book, Overqualified, Comeau writes résumé cover letters to major corporations, but he gets extremely personal, tells lewd jokes and gets (almost) too honest. His letter to Greenpeace starts out: “Dear Greenpeace, I have been thinking about sex.” And it only gets better.

In one letter to Irving Oil, Comeau claims he is a time-traveling centurion who wants to destroy the planet. He tells his weird, violent dreams to Parker Bros. He threatens MasterCard and Sony. Comeau is frustrated with capitalism, and he attacks relentlessly.

The best part is that, for a while, Comeau was actually mailing out these strange, wonderful letters like real cover letters. He stopped after he got into some trouble with the law, but he still publishes them for free on his Web site, asofterworld.com. So yeah, you can read all these letters without charge, but you should still buy the book.

Why? Because Overqualified is what I call a “back-pocket book.” It’s small and paperback and fits perfectly into a back-pocket. Overqualified is a book you take everywhere, the kind you share with friends and in which you write dark thoughts in the margins, and after a mere month of owning it, your copy is held together with rubber bands. Overqualified is the type of book you don’t read, you devour.

Because the book is a series of letters, it’s short, and you can read it at your leisure. Maybe you can finish it in an afternoon, but you’ll never truly stop reading it. Years from now, you’ll unbind your tattered first edition, flip through the pages and reread an especially meaningful letter. Maybe the one about Gillette and manhood. Or the letter sent to a preschool asking for a second chance. Or perhaps the surrealistic nostalgia Comeau sent to Samsonite, in which he revisits his dead relatives.

As you read, each letter feels less like a job request and more like a diary entry. You feel close to Comeau’s heart, and whoever Susan and Adrian are, you love and long for them with Comeau.

And maybe you reach for the phonebook. You know Comeau isn’t listed, but you check anyway, because maybe, just maybe, he is, and you can call him up on the phone whenever you feel like it, like Caulfield said. Overqualified will do that to you.