Dear Mr. Comeau,
Please accept my application for position of book reviewer. I thought I’d start with your epistolary novella, Overqualified, published by ECW Press here in Toronto. As you can see already, I have a basic grasp of the big words that literary types like to use when talking about the stuff that authors, you know, produce when they write stuff. I could have said that Overqualified is a short book written as a bunch of cover letters to big corporations, but that would have been too obvious and too many regular people would have understood me. If we writers are going to keep up appearances, you know, elevate ourselves in the eyes of mere mortals, then it’s important to remain pretentious and obscure. Isn’t it brilliant the way we can exploit forms to create a professional distance? Isn’t it amazing the way the tools of the trade alienate our readers? But isn’t even more amazing the way readers can be duped into expecting those very tools of the trade? They’re like dogs come begging to be kicked.
Cover letters are kind of the same deal. How did we ever get to this place where we would all agree, like some kind of masochistic social contract, that we would participate in this demeaning process of introducing ourselves to giant impersonal prospective employers with vacuous and almost certainly mendacious statements of our desire to be kicked into submission? You’ve captured perfectly the absurdity of this situation. Why not get chatty? Why not get personal? We can’t help revealing personal details about ourselves anyways. I always imagine there’s some HR guru on the receiving end – someone with Conan-Doyle-esque skills of inference who can read between the lines anyways. So why even bother to pretend that we’ve got our shit together, that we know exactly what we want from life, that our goals are served perfectly by a job in the pharmaceutical industry, say, or in software development?
Take me for example. I don’t really want a job as a book reviewer. When I was a kid, what I really wanted to do was dance in the National Ballet. I was eleven when the Kirov ballet came to Toronto and Mikhail Baryshnikov defected. Not that he was defective. Quite the contrary. It created such a buzz in the city that I knew immediately ballet was my destiny – until my brother broke the baby toe on my left foot during a game of street hockey and I couldn’t do a proper plié after that. I’ve always resented my brother for that. Once, I even accused him of ruining my life. Oh well.
You do the same thing with your letters. I think it’s cool the way I find myself filling in the “gaps” – those inferential spaces that your letters create – so that I end up writing the back story of your letters. There’s bitterness and grief, but there’s also humour and a clear grasp of the absurd in this crazy world we’ve written for ourselves. Well done! Now I’m going to call up my brother. We’re too old for street hockey, but I can still whup his ass at ping pong.