Mailman (Paperback)

Mailman has had a sad history of difficult relationships in both family and romance, and he has come to terms with life by adopting a stoical attitude to the sad events which come his way, and also by "borrowing" a quantity of letters every day, taking them back to his room and photocopying them, then delivering them the next day. In this way he has learned much about his fellow townsfolk and his mail-round becomes for him a soap opera of family crises, failing love affairs and financial problems. In between delivering mail, Mailman occupies himself by going to the library, the cinema and the coffee shop, a hum drum routing which keeps him busy until almost inevitably things start to go terribly wrong.

The skill of this book is that the reader gets drawn into Mailman's quirky world-view and his reflections on events in his past. Some of these events are hilariously funny, while others are painfully sad, leaving the reader with a great deal of sympathy for this very strange individual.

But Lennon has not just written an ordinary novel here. By following the course of Mailman's life we learn much about the authors view of the human condition, and much of his narrative resonates with our own lives, for we too have met the sort of people who come into Mailman's life, and we too have had cringingly embarrassing incidents happen to us, and have suffered disappointments of the same order as Lennon's Mailman. What makes this book really special however is the last 100 pages. The problem with reviewing a book is that it is necessary to avoid spoiling it for other readers. However, the end of this book defines the whole, and in the last couple of chapters we find a story which explains to much about what happens to Mailman and about the forgiveness and acceptance that comes the way of even this difficult and awkward character. Lennon ends his novel by demonstrating that there is hope for us, if there is hope for Mailman. A hugely heart-warming novel with much humour and drama along the way.

But in fact he is never in any danger of losing us. Partly this is because even the surface activity of this low-key life is in fact pretty engrossing - a quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister, an ominous lump under his arm which leads to a dependency on painkillers, a history of trouble with authority including an unremembered attempt to bite the eyes of his college professor, and a long-established practice of keeping aside certain items of mail to read them and attempt to reseal them before delivering to their rightful recipients, which means he knows all the people on his route better than they know Mailman the mailman:

"How many unplanned pregnancies, for example, have to befall Jodie M. Steiner of 325 Creekedge Lane before she stops sleeping with her parents' seventy-year-old neighbour (Thomas Effening of 327 Creekedge, professor emeritus of sociology and boinker of several other neighbourhood nymphets of the past -a reliably interesting letter-writer, to be sure)? For how many years is Mark Poll of 830 North Sage Avenue, Apartment 5A, going to get drunk and vandalize cars in the middle of the night before he finds some other way to deny life's emptiness?"

And partly it is because Lennon's prose is so full of investment in detail and lively imagination - literally not a page goes by without something to delight in ("Winter is only a verb if you're rich" / "Travel was its own country, the plane ticket that country's passport, its race the race of pale, haggard people dragging bags down gray-tiled hallways") - that, pound for pound, I can't remember the last time I read a less boring book.

At the same time Mailman is undeniably bleak: the women who deign to sleep with Mailman (four in all, in his fifty-seven years) do so because they are as bored and lonely and unsure as he is; the authority figures, employers and teachers, who punish him do so through a petty-minded weakness and cruelty that reflects his own. His feelings about the burgeoning growth that marks the general decline in his health are so richly depicted that I literally found myself closing the book at one point and feeling under my own arm to make sure there was nothing there. And it is all as rich. And there are no happy surprises. But they are not required when the cast of characters, from Graham the neurotic coffee shop owner to Mailman's sarcastic mother, are so entertaining, nor when you have passages of prose like this, when Mailman's representative status is spelled out cleanly:

"It is the occupation of all existence, to ferry things from place to place, for the universe is filled with matter, and if it stays where it is, it is dead; and if it moves, it is alive. And since life exists, and since the aim of life is to continue living, and since the essence of living is to move, then movement is done. It is all - isn't it? - mail. Every particle, every force, every emotion; every thought, every object, every impulse, has its destination. Every datum is addressed with the name of its beloved: the pheromone finds its receptor, the dog roots out its bone, the sentence seeks the period at its end: and it is all mail."

So in case I haven't made it clear: this, I think, is a very good book. It proves, if not that the unexamined life is worth living, at least that the accumulation of evidence is enough, if that's all we get. In every conceivable sense, Mailman delivers.

Albert Lippincott, or the Mailman as he calls himself, is such a complex modern “ant-hero” – trundling along in his dead-end job as a Mailman with the U.S. Postal Service, while surreptitiously reading customers mail on the sly, and also recounting in a kind of vast mindscape, the loves, dramas and tragedies of his life. There are some marvelous moments in this novel, particularly when Albert recounts his childhood: his strange, sexually ambiguous relationship with his sister Gillian, his efforts to trap and defeat his high school English teacher Jim Gorman, and his failed, obscenely misguided trip to Kazakhstan with the Peace Corps, which will have you roaring with laughter.

Robert Lennon has complete control of his narrative, and using succinct precise language explores, not only Albert’s inner thoughts with his cynical and sardonic observations about life and the world around him, but also explores, with an understated beauty, the quirkiness and eccentricities of small-town American life. The reader is constantly “blasted” with an almost stream of consciousness storyline, as Albert, betrayed, disappointed, and unrequited, fills his head with equations, images, sounds and sensations as if some extra dimensional vessel has flowed into him and he is the vessel. At the end of the novel he looks back with regret - he was a lousy student, a duplicitous mailman, and a rotten husband: demanding, ungrateful, and uncooperative – and he has such a sense of melancholy and disappointment towards all of this. The chaos of Mailman’s existence mirrors the chaos of the universe; the universe, like Mailman’s sad abortive life isn’t orderly at all; “it was a god-awful mess that nobody could sort out.”

Mailman is one of the most insightful, challenging and ambitious books of the year and certainly deserves a lot of attention.

Michael