Monkey Droppings - Overqualifed by Joey Comeau

In today's exciting episode of the barely-coherent ramblings of a primate with delusions of being human (or at least, a critic), we present:





Overqualified
by Joey Comeau

Dear RAND,

I am writing to apply for a job with the RAND Corporation. The first time I heard of the RAND Corporation was on The X-Files, the conspiracy-theory-heavy television show I was obsessed with in high school. I watched every episode. That was the beginning of my paranoia, my belief that there are huge corporations behind everything. That everything that happens in the world happens for a reason.

If there exists a more tedious, exhausting, frustrating experience than the writing and rewriting of your resume and cover letter, I haven't found it. Hours of your life can be spent poring over every little detail, trying to tickle out every nugget of experience from your meagre employment background, not to mention editing for spelling and grammar. You find yourself re-evaluating the entirety of your life over a few pages of bullet points and half-hearted exaggerations. It's the creation of mountains from something less than molehills, and there is not one sane person alive who enjoys the experience. And reading them? Feh. Almost as bad.

So let's give Canadian author Joey Comeau this much credit: he's made the writing of cover letters seem like a pleasure. More importantly, he's made the reading of said letters a joy. And in the process, he's provided an epistolary novel that surprises, moves, and makes one chuckle incessantly on the plane ride home. OK, that's a personal experience, but you get the gist: Overqualified is one gem of a read.

Overqualified is, quite simply, a series of letters, but Overqualified is not the usual epistolary novel where the writer pens notes to A or B, and possibly A or B responds. Overqualified follows the format of cover letters written to companies such as Apple, Bell, and Nintendo. Rather than simply listing his qualifications with the use of artful euphemisms, the job-seeker Joey Comeau decides to use the letters a launching point for family anecdotes, bizarre jokes, and a very real sense of personal tragedy. When Comeau, applying to be a bicycle tour guide, outlines a sample tour with the narration, "Coming up on the left, we find the bakery where my very first girlfriend works...When we were fourteen, we both got really drunk and had sex," there are true inklings that not all is well in Comeau's world.

Comeau, best known for his surreal web comic a softer world, crafts his letters into an nonlinear diary of sorts, and an abiding sense of melancholy begins to creep into the missives. His letters run the gamut of topics, from personal reminiscences to dreams to sexual fantasies to musings on the state of humanity. There is no plot per se, but as readers make their way through Comeau's slim-but-hardly-slight volume, an unflinching honesty concerning the state of the narrator's world comes into focus. Comeau the author may be just fine (who's to say?), but Comeau the job hunter is in serious disarray.

Overqualified is a hard novel to categorize; is it a memoir? An exercise in form and style? A joke? Probably all, and then some. What I can definitely categorize Overqualified as is a book of humour laced with despair, truly original, and a pleasure to read.

MONKEY LIKES A LOT AND THEN SOME

Finally, I can defeat Kirk in battle.

I always wanted to be a Romulan. I dig the big-shouldered look.

However, the Vulcans do have their charms.

And who didn't have a thing for Uhura? No one, that's who.

Monkey Droppings - Trauma by Patrick McGrath

On today's menu: loss and desire, with a side of psychoanalysis.





Trauma
by Patrick McGrath

I stood on the sidewalk and stared at it, and it stared back at me, sagging, unsafe, condemned, and the blocked windows were like dead eyes, blank and opaque but pregnant, somehow, with secrets, like a trauma built of wood.

There are two things you can almost always expect when you crack open a Patrick McGrath:

1. you are going to discover an intricate, highly literate examination of the darker impulses of humankind, and
2. you are going to get depressed.

I mean 'depressed' in the best sense of the word. McGrath invariably conjures up worlds of such bleakness and despair that the reader inevitably feels the weight of the world crushing down on him. And any humour McGrath see fit to leaven the proceedings is wit of the darkest sort. Witness The Grotesque, his opulently cynical debut novel (seriously, read it and prepare to gasp), with its Mervyn Peake-esque characters such as Fledge the butler and Sir Fleckley Tome the barrister. And with titles such as Dr. Haggard's Disease, Spider, Asylum, and Port Mungo, the british novelist has deservedly earned a reputation as a true gothic stylist who delves into the shadowy worlds of mental illness, illicit affairs, and barely-suppresed sexual urges with flair and decidedly marvelous polish.

Trauma, McGrath's seventh novel, is arguably his most 'mainstream' work to date, being set in 1970's New York and populated by people far more identifiable and easily empathized with than his earlier works. Absent are the gloriously strange names and eerie settings (until the final third, that is). This is not to say that Trauma is a leave of form; still present are the sexual longings, the alienating repression, and the bleak despair that marks his best works. But perhaps as a result of it's more commonplace setting, Trauma feels like lesser McGrath, an examination of people's hidden scars that never reaches the lunatic heights of his best works.

McGrath's protagonist is Charlie Weir, a psychiatrist as inwardly conflicted as the patients he counsels. His marriage broke up years earlier due to a miscalculation on his part, and now he is alone and lonely. A new relationship with a mysterious but fragile woman promises to heal him, but his ongoing infatuation with his ex-wife, and the emotional web that entangles him with his family's past, threaten to overwhelm the tenuous peace he has made with himself.

As in McGrath's best works, Trauma is rife with, well, trauma; Charlie suffers, his brother suffers, his wife agonizes, his father drinks to forget. There is not one character present who is not damaged in some way, which is as it should be, and McGrath makes you feel every pang of remorse.

Yet Trauma feels rote, at least for McGrath. The psychiatrist unable to cure his own ailments is not exactly a new subject for literary dissection, and McGrath brings nothing new to the theme. The strange, unknown agony Charlie suffers from, in its ultimate reveal, feels like a cheat. It's too simple an explanation, one which belies the narrative's central theme of how we can never truly understand anyone else. The ending feels as rushed as Charlie's eventual descent into near-insanity. The final third of the novel finds a stronger footing, as Charlie's exterior settings begin to mirror his withdrawal into himself, but the final few pages are hurried and feel like an afterthought. McGrath travels the avenues of the psyche with aplomb, but Trauma, while hardly a feel-good story of redemption, isn't dark enough to satisfy it's set-up.

MONKEY LIKES WITH RESERVATIONS

Monkey Droppings - Coventry by Helen Humphreys

Two reviews in two days? I'm on some kind of a roll here. I think that flu bug I've been fighting is tickling my cortex into action. Not action of a necessarily productive sort, but action nonetheless! Good job, typewriter-banging monkey!

Better not jinx it by talking about it, so without further ado:



Coventry
by Helen Humphreys

"For all her efforts Harriet can't really remember Owen very well. His memory has been worn thin from use, like a patch of clot rubbed too vigorously and too often. She has her ideas of him and of their happiness, but at this point the reality of him has been subsumed into her own need to remember him in a certain way. In real life he would never have bent to her will, but now that he's dead she can do whatever she chooses with him. This knowledge sickens her, but she is also powerless against it."

We are all the products of our triumphs and our tragedies. Harriet lost her new husband to the trench warfare of World War I. Maeve bore a child out of wedlock, and has to fend for herself ever since. In one night, trapped in Coventry during the German bombing raids of the Second World War, both women find their pasts effecting their decisions in surprising ways.

This sketch of a narrative has the potential to go one of two ways; either the resulting novel will be an overly sentimental gush of nostalgia and female empowerment, or it will be a subtle and often wrenching study of loss and remembrance. Luckily, Canadian author Helen Humphreys is at the helm, and Coventry, her first novel after The Lost Garden (a Canada Reads selection for 2003), is a remarkably moving and insightful effort, stark and clear.

There is very little in the way of surprise in Humphrey's compact novel; Coventry is not a story of momentum, and there is a foreboding sense of inevitability hanging over the proceedings, as if all this has already passed. The women had met once previously, on a care-free day before WWI had begun, and there is a sense of the inescapable that the two will meet again. This sense of the novel being an elegy serves to drag down the story to a standstill at times, resulting in a lack of immediacy that blunts the ultimate ending. Add on an unlikely coincidence involving Harriet and a stranger not to be named here, and Coventry falls shy of becoming the masterpiece it yearns to be.

Humphrey's strengths comes out in her characterization of Harriet and Maeve, two women as vital as any that have stalked the pages of Canadian literature. Harriet is scarred, hardened and alone after the loss of a husband she barely new; Maeve is exhausted from life, and her longings to become an artist have fallen by the wayside along many such sadly disposed-of dreams. As Humphrey alternates from each woman's POV as the long night wears on, we see their lives intersect on paths they never planned on traveling.

Humphrey's other great triumph is her evocation of the bombing raids; nightmarish imagery abounds as catastrophe follows catastrophe, numbing the populace insensate. "My wife was killed," remarks a man with a chilling distance from his words, "standing in the kitchen, making us a cup of tea." Helen is in the thick of it, running through the devastation as people perish in ways both savage and calm. Maeve is in the countryside, fleeing, apart from her son and surrounded by strangers. Coventry is a city destroyed beyond recognition, and Humphrey presents an unflinching portrait of people stunned by incomprehensible violence that is sadly all too identifiable today.

Coventry is an often stunning novel, a crystal-clear evocation of things lost and found again under extraordinary circumstances. Its flaws only serve to highlight Coventry's tremendous strengths.

MONKEY LIKES A LOT

Monkey Droppings - Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

I'm going to put a few quick book reviews up in the next few days, to make up for an appalling break on my part. They'll be quick, and hardly insightful, but I do hope you'll read the books anyway, and forgive my lackadaisical nature.

Also, I'm starting a new ratings system. I'm sick of As, Bs, Cs, etc. You'll find the new handy-dandy rating at the bottom of each review.

And now, to work! If twenty minutes of ill-conceived ramblings can be considered work. It can? Score!

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
by Brock Clarke

Sam Pulsifer has a problem, or rather, many problems. He was convicted of arson and inadvertent murder after a youthful escapade ended in the fiery destruction of Emily Dickinson's house, and the deaths of the two caretakers inside. Years later, after serving his sentence, Sam appears to have his life back on track; he has a wife, lovely kids, a degree in packaging science, and no contact with his parents or anything from his previous life. Until the son of the dead caretakers shows up for an apology, and the homes of other famous authors are mysteriously torched.

From such beginnings grows a novel of insanity and revenge that almost effortlessly achieves a strange and alluring grandeur. An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is a gratifyingly accomplished novel that puts author Brock Clarke on my watch list.

What makes Guide such a marvelous comedy, aside from Clarke's clear prose and sparking wit, is his treatment of his lead character. In the best tradition of classic comedic heroes, Sam is not so much an actor as a reactor, always one step behind and guided by forces beyond his control. There is quite a bit of the hapless Sam Lowry in Pulsifer, the befuddled hero of Terry Gilliam's satire Brazil. Pulsifer, like Lowry, is an immediately identifiable 'bumbler' (in the parlance of his father), trying to wend his way through life without causing ruckus or discord, yet constantly forced to act against his will. As he slowly tracks down the real arsonist - aided by letters written to him while in prison, pleading for him to burn down other the homes of other authors such as Mark Twain or Robert Frost - Pulsifer examines the effect stories have on people, and how people are desperate to have stories of their own.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is a major accomplishment in comic misadventure, a softly endearing dissection of the love of good stories, and a treat of a novel.

MONKEY LIKES A LOT

Derek Weiler, 1968-2009

It is with great sadness that I learned today of the death of Derek Weiler.

Derek was the editor of Quill and Quire, Canada's book industry magazine. I only met him a few times at trade events, but he always struck me a very friendly, approachable man who greatly enjoyed both his job and the people his work brought him into contact with.

Apparently he had been sick for some time. He was a hell of a nice man, and has been taken far too soon. He will be sorely missed.

More news of his passing can be found here.

People don't learn...

From Chapter 22 of the zen-like ode to incompetence that is James Patterson's online 'virus kidnap crap-o-rama' Airborne:

‘Don’t even think about trying that again, b*tch,’ he hissed in her ear.

‘Someone get the girl!’ Jones ordered from the floor through clenched teeth. ‘Somebody get that machete!’

‘F*ck!’ The biker restraining Lesley threw her behind him roughly and joined the circle closing in on Amanda.

Seriously? Still with the *s? What if I can't crack the code? Batch? Botch? Fick? I don't understand this idiomatic lingo! And what if they throw in a # or a %? I didn't do well in calculus, I can't solve for Y!

This entire exercise is like a slo-mo car crash, with another automobile adding to the pile every day. I have read articles in the Weekly World News that make more sense, and have a better grasp of pacing and characterization.

That said, like the movies of Uwe Boll, I cannot look away, and eagerly await Patterson's sure -to-be-awe-inspiring conclusion.