‘The Complete Lockpick Pornography’ by Joey Comeau
Posted: March 25, 2013
Book Reviews
Reviewed by Jason R. Freeman
Joey Comeau is unmistakably a provocateur, though his literary ambitions extend beyond simple provocation. Comeau’s The Complete Lockpick Pornography, a collection of two thematically linked novellas, is both gleefully and constructively subversive (though not always in equal measure) as Comeau’s characters attempt to remake society to fit their own individual conceptions of sex and gender and love.
“Lockpick Pornography,” the collection’s lead novella, was previously published in 2005 by Loose Teeth Press. A “genderqueer adventure story,” it features a motley crew of gay and transgendered anarchists as they fight and fuck their way through a vaguely defined war on society; every straight person they encounter is a potential enemy combatant.
The novella has a rollicking energy. The sex is plentiful and the violence cartoonish, the prose spare and propulsive. Interwoven within the novella’s admittedly entertaining antics are some engagingly complex societal concerns; the novella is jam-packed with ideas on sex, gender, love, romance, and traditional societal roles. The “Lockpick” crew’s main objective involves planting copies of a subversive children’s book of their own creation, and they riff extensively on its potential subject matter:
We can have an older sister who comes out of the closet, maybe. And she wants to be an astronaut and get married to her lady friend on the moon! And all the neighbourhood kids decide they want to be gay astronauts too.
We could have a kid who just changes gender at random … He wakes up and all of a sudden he’s a girl. He doesn’t feel any different on the inside, but on the outside he’s all pigtails and rosy cheeks. His mom and dad insist that he’s always been a girl. His toys are all replaced by dolls and tea sets.
The book is genuinely funny, if you can handle your humour acerbic and pitch black: “when I see a straight guy with some ditsy-looking pinup girl … I want to push her down stairs. I want her to step out in front of a car and leave a makeup smear for blocks. This is how I react to the beauty myth, I guess.”
“Lockpick” is not without flaws, however. The unnamed narrator’s pronouncements occasionally veer into proselytizing: “Monogamy is defined by what it is not, just as much as by what it is … We couldn’t have monogamy without infidelity, the same as we couldn’t have sad without happy, or down without up. By fucking around in secret, within a relationship, aren’t I just playing the devil in monogamy’s Sunday-school pageant?” The narrator here becomes less an independent character and more an authorial megaphone. The novella’s adventures are mostly random and episodic, which fits its inherent messiness, but Comeau attempts to unify the work’s manifold concerns with the introduction of a single character late in the novella, and the ending is artificially tidy.
The collection’s second novella, the previously unpublished “We All Got It Coming,” trades “Lockpick”’s go-for-broke energy for a much quieter mode. Its protagonist is Arthur, a late-twenties dead-end-jobber; it’s easy to imagine that Arthur is the unnamed narrator of “Lockpick,” his anarchist edges sanded off by the passage of time. For all of “Lockpick”’s too-cool-for-school attitude towards romantic relationships, “Coming” is an un-ironic love story, focusing on Arthur’s developing relationship with his security guard boyfriend.
The central incident of “Coming” is an act of homophobic violence that occurs at Arthur’s workplace. Comeau plays this incident way down, keeping the scene realistically low-key. The specifics of the incident are well-chosen: the act itself is nearly accidental, almost minor enough to be shrugged off, which Arthur futilely attempts to do, over and over, throughout the story.
“Coming” mostly mirrors the episodic, rambling plotting of “Lockpick,” occasionally to the novella’s detriment. “Coming” works best when it zeroes in on the central relationship; chapters dedicated to Arthur’s job at a rest home feel superfluous in an already brief text.
Comeau the provocateur is still active in “Coming,” though his methods alter. Somewhat ironically, it’s “We All Got It Coming,” not “Lockpick Pornography,” that becomes pornographic, its sex scenes rising to near-William S. Burroughs levels of detail and prominence; in one lengthy (and perhaps entirely gratuitous) scene, the word “cock” appears eight times in the space of two pages. But Comeau’s provocations are occasionally still constructive, and instructive. Early in the novella, Comeau juxtaposes a scene of rough dom/sub sex with Arthur’s internal debate of a universal romantic concern: when should he confess to his new beau that he’s fallen in love? Here Comeau makes his point subtly and effectively, contrasting “Lockpick”‘s ideological broadsides.
Despite their disparity of tone, the two novellas work together surprisingly well. All of Comeau’s thoroughly-established concerns from “Lockpick” remain subtextually present in “Coming,” and ideas bounce between the two works. When Arthur eventually reacts to his mounting frustration with his own act of violence, he immediately realizes its utter futility. This underlines the complete lack of a productive means to respond to the prejudice that Arthur and the narrator of “Lockpick” both face. Directly after Arthur is assaulted, Comeau gives the reader a near-perfect metaphor, as Arthur acts out his frustrations in the bathroom of his workplace: “There’s a garbage can there, and I kick it as hard as I can. The side caves in and then pops right back to its shape.” All this casts new light on “Lockpick”’s violence, which initially may have read as simple juvenile wish fulfillment.
Comeau’s pointed sense of humour is still present in “Coming,” but its gags increasingly rely on references to pop culture such as The Muppet Show and Die Hard. This reliance becomes a larger problem in the conclusion. The novella’s final pages are dominated by a recounting of the ending of John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles, as Arthur attempts to draw parallels between himself and John Candy’s character from the film. Comeau essentially gestures vaguely at Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and instructs the reader: “Feel like that.” It’s unfortunately hard to use any word other than lazy to describe this technique.
One can easily imagine that Comeau is capable of a fully formed, fully mature work of literature that strikes the tricky balance between provocation and profundity. The Complete Lockpick Pornography is not that work, but despite its imperfections, it is certainly evidence that Comeau is contributing a vital, welcome voice to a dialogue integral to our society.
Coach House | 168 pages | $14.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770410695
‘The Complete Lockpick Pornography’ by Joey Comeau
Book Reviews
Joey Comeau is unmistakably a provocateur, though his literary ambitions extend beyond simple provocation. Comeau’s The Complete Lockpick Pornography, a collection of two thematically linked novellas, is both gleefully and constructively subversive (though not always in equal measure) as Comeau’s characters attempt to remake society to fit their own individual conceptions of sex and gender and love.
“Lockpick Pornography,” the collection’s lead novella, was previously published in 2005 by Loose Teeth Press. A “genderqueer adventure story,” it features a motley crew of gay and transgendered anarchists as they fight and fuck their way through a vaguely defined war on society; every straight person they encounter is a potential enemy combatant.
The novella has a rollicking energy. The sex is plentiful and the violence cartoonish, the prose spare and propulsive. Interwoven within the novella’s admittedly entertaining antics are some engagingly complex societal concerns; the novella is jam-packed with ideas on sex, gender, love, romance, and traditional societal roles. The “Lockpick” crew’s main objective involves planting copies of a subversive children’s book of their own creation, and they riff extensively on its potential subject matter:
We can have an older sister who comes out of the closet, maybe. And she wants to be an astronaut and get married to her lady friend on the moon! And all the neighbourhood kids decide they want to be gay astronauts too.
We could have a kid who just changes gender at random … He wakes up and all of a sudden he’s a girl. He doesn’t feel any different on the inside, but on the outside he’s all pigtails and rosy cheeks. His mom and dad insist that he’s always been a girl. His toys are all replaced by dolls and tea sets.
The book is genuinely funny, if you can handle your humour acerbic and pitch black: “when I see a straight guy with some ditsy-looking pinup girl … I want to push her down stairs. I want her to step out in front of a car and leave a makeup smear for blocks. This is how I react to the beauty myth, I guess.”
“Lockpick” is not without flaws, however. The unnamed narrator’s pronouncements occasionally veer into proselytizing: “Monogamy is defined by what it is not, just as much as by what it is … We couldn’t have monogamy without infidelity, the same as we couldn’t have sad without happy, or down without up. By fucking around in secret, within a relationship, aren’t I just playing the devil in monogamy’s Sunday-school pageant?” The narrator here becomes less an independent character and more an authorial megaphone. The novella’s adventures are mostly random and episodic, which fits its inherent messiness, but Comeau attempts to unify the work’s manifold concerns with the introduction of a single character late in the novella, and the ending is artificially tidy.
The collection’s second novella, the previously unpublished “We All Got It Coming,” trades “Lockpick”’s go-for-broke energy for a much quieter mode. Its protagonist is Arthur, a late-twenties dead-end-jobber; it’s easy to imagine that Arthur is the unnamed narrator of “Lockpick,” his anarchist edges sanded off by the passage of time. For all of “Lockpick”’s too-cool-for-school attitude towards romantic relationships, “Coming” is an un-ironic love story, focusing on Arthur’s developing relationship with his security guard boyfriend.
The central incident of “Coming” is an act of homophobic violence that occurs at Arthur’s workplace. Comeau plays this incident way down, keeping the scene realistically low-key. The specifics of the incident are well-chosen: the act itself is nearly accidental, almost minor enough to be shrugged off, which Arthur futilely attempts to do, over and over, throughout the story.
“Coming” mostly mirrors the episodic, rambling plotting of “Lockpick,” occasionally to the novella’s detriment. “Coming” works best when it zeroes in on the central relationship; chapters dedicated to Arthur’s job at a rest home feel superfluous in an already brief text.
Comeau the provocateur is still active in “Coming,” though his methods alter. Somewhat ironically, it’s “We All Got It Coming,” not “Lockpick Pornography,” that becomes pornographic, its sex scenes rising to near-William S. Burroughs levels of detail and prominence; in one lengthy (and perhaps entirely gratuitous) scene, the word “cock” appears eight times in the space of two pages. But Comeau’s provocations are occasionally still constructive, and instructive. Early in the novella, Comeau juxtaposes a scene of rough dom/sub sex with Arthur’s internal debate of a universal romantic concern: when should he confess to his new beau that he’s fallen in love? Here Comeau makes his point subtly and effectively, contrasting “Lockpick”‘s ideological broadsides.
Despite their disparity of tone, the two novellas work together surprisingly well. All of Comeau’s thoroughly-established concerns from “Lockpick” remain subtextually present in “Coming,” and ideas bounce between the two works. When Arthur eventually reacts to his mounting frustration with his own act of violence, he immediately realizes its utter futility. This underlines the complete lack of a productive means to respond to the prejudice that Arthur and the narrator of “Lockpick” both face. Directly after Arthur is assaulted, Comeau gives the reader a near-perfect metaphor, as Arthur acts out his frustrations in the bathroom of his workplace: “There’s a garbage can there, and I kick it as hard as I can. The side caves in and then pops right back to its shape.” All this casts new light on “Lockpick”’s violence, which initially may have read as simple juvenile wish fulfillment.
Comeau’s pointed sense of humour is still present in “Coming,” but its gags increasingly rely on references to pop culture such as The Muppet Show and Die Hard. This reliance becomes a larger problem in the conclusion. The novella’s final pages are dominated by a recounting of the ending of John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles, as Arthur attempts to draw parallels between himself and John Candy’s character from the film. Comeau essentially gestures vaguely at Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and instructs the reader: “Feel like that.” It’s unfortunately hard to use any word other than lazy to describe this technique.
One can easily imagine that Comeau is capable of a fully formed, fully mature work of literature that strikes the tricky balance between provocation and profundity. The Complete Lockpick Pornography is not that work, but despite its imperfections, it is certainly evidence that Comeau is contributing a vital, welcome voice to a dialogue integral to our society.
Coach House | 168 pages | $14.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770410695