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Summary
Summary
"A phantasmagoria of American paranoia and self-loathing in the person of a deranged but somehow good-hearted middle-aged mail carrier in steep decline, the book hums with a kind of chipper angst," writes Jonathan Lethem in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Mailman tells the blackly comic story of Albert Lippincott. Albert is Nestor, New York's mailman extraordinaire--aggressively cheerful, obsessively efficient. But he also has a few things to hide: his habit of reading other people's mail, a nervous breakdown, and a sexually ambiguous entanglement with his sister. Now his supervisors are on to his letter-hoarding compulsion, and there's a throbbing pain under his right arm. Things are closing in on Albert, who will soon be forced to confront, once and for all, his life's failures. Funny and moving, driven by a wild, compulsive interior voice, Mailman is a unique creation, a deeply original American novel. Already optioned to the movies, this astonishing and kinetically charged tale was one of the most exuberantly praised novels of 2003.
Author Notes
J. Robert Lennon is the author of "The Light of Falling Stars" & "The Funnies". He lives with his wife & children in Ithaca, NY.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From one perspective, mail can be seen as merely the humble ebb and flow of letters, bills and advertisements. From another perspective, it is the cosmic principle of life itself: "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." Lennon's protagonist, Mailman, aka Albert Lippincott, oscillates between this postal version of the sublime and the ridiculous. The novel unfolds from June 2, 2000, when someone on Albert's mail route, Jared Sprain, in Nestor, N.Y., commits suicide. On that night, Albert is caught by one of Jared's neighbors delivering a letter to Jared's box. The neighbor thinks there is something irregular about Albert's activities, and she is right: his dirty secret is that he reads, copies and sometimes doesn't deliver his mail. She apparently reports him, for Albert is suddenly taken in by Post Office inspectors for interrogation. After he is released pending further investigation, he skips town, heading vaguely for his retired parents' place in Florida. Lennon (The Funnies, etc.) lays out Albert's life in big blocks of introspections and reminiscences. Albert harbors a semiconscious sexual longing for his sister, Gillian, who is an actress; retains violent memories of his mother, a slutty singer, and more pathetic memories of his father, a chemist. Albert is sensitive to odors, subject to mental dissonance, angry, and feels alternately trapped and comforted by his routines. He's both Everyman and Nobody. As with one of Chuck Close's blown-up photo-realistic portraits, we feel both confronted and fascinated by Albert's sheer materiality. This is an intermittently brilliant text-with long, maddeningly tedious patches-and will surely be much noted this fall. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Albert Lippincott--Mailman--is an odd choice for an everyman character. A loner who reads the mail before delivering it, he's obsessive, depressive, and sexually confused. He struggles with the women in his life and fights with the cats they leave behind. The narrative begins with a letter delivered too late to a suicide and a woman who reports Mailman to the dreaded postal inspectors. As external events precipitate internal crisis, Mailman scrutinizes his past, searching for meaning in a world that tolerates him at best. Lennon performs a book-long balancing act, slowly letting us into this complex character's interior life. And Mailman is a complex character: Is he misunderstood or is he a liar? Is he persecuted or justly punished? Is the lump under his arm a bruise or a tumor? Did he really try to bite out a professor's eyeball? But because his neuroses are rooted in hopes and fears we all understand, this mumbling, lurching oddball, this guy we'd all walk past on the street, becomes someone we know and care about--and maybe recognize in the mirror. Lennon's fourth novel is emotionally engrossing and intellectually stimulating, full of humor, pathos, and surprises. To choose only one word: magnificent. --Keir Graff Copyright 2003 Booklist
Guardian Review
"Going postal" is a new American usage. It does not mean parcelling yourself to your destination as an alternative to flying economy class, but refers to the tendency of US postal workers to crack under the pressure of providing a competitive service. J Robert Lennon's mailman went postal some time ago. The novelist recalls hearing his postman banging and swearing at the mailboxes, which was how he could tell when the letters had arrived. More troubling was the mailman's familiarity with Lennon's correspondence. This was about the time that he was starting out as a writer and sending off submissions to literary magazines. "The postman would say things like, 'Hear anything from the Kenyon Review?'". Now Lennon has got his revenge by turning the piqued, peeking postie into the subject of a book. And not just any book - Lennon's fourth work of fiction is his application to be regarded as a Great American Novelist, the super-heavyweight title of the literary world, which demands that you weigh in with at least 500 pages before you are permitted to enter the ring. Five hundred pages about a depressed postman is a tall order. And this fat parcel of a book does, on close examination, consist of quite a lot of padding. But Mailman is a modern Everyman - the little guy who shoulders big concerns or, in this case, a voluminous sack, the contents of which he acquaints himself with by taking work home with him. Mailman (he does have a real name, which is Albert, but Lennon refers to him as Mailman throughout) has lived all his 57 years in Nestor, "a shabby outpost of divine oversight", and spent the last 30 of them working for the post office after his promising college career imploded. As a condition of his employment, he has been obliged to attend a course of anger-management sessions, which succeed only in winding him up further. The therapist comes to the conclusion that Mailman is "a cesspool of unfulfilled ambition" in which something vital is decaying: "Something died in you, Albert, which you failed to dispose of properly, and now is, if you will, stinking up your very self." Mailman is an uningratiating character, and not at all comfortable to approach as closely as Lennon bids us. But he does provide a platform from which to launch some bilious, comic broadsides, propelled by an almost Rabelaisian sense of disgust. How can one not applaud this assessment of street festivals, for example: "The annual self- congratulatory citywide jerkoff: City Square full of longhairs hawking their cheesy doodads out of plywood booths, restaurateurs setting up greasepits on the sidewalk, experimental theatre groups emoting at intersections, tiedyed shirts and wormy local fruits and everywhere a plague of little kids." At his best, Lennon puts you in mind of John Updike's Harry Angstrom visiting Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. The problem is, there is too much of it. Rather than gaining power through accumulative observation, the narrative becomes bogged down with unnecessary detail. Mailman cannot complete a simple action such as opening a newspaper without a stage-direction butting in: "(rubber band breaks, stinging his goddam hand)". This disruptive tendency gets even worse when Mailman spills his coffee: "Masters himself, sets down the cup (its corrugated cardboard 'Java Jacket' loses its grip on the cup and slips down to the counter, which it strikes with a dainty pock)." In James Joyce's hands this might have come off. Here it reads less like inspirational prose than a lackadaisical approach to editing. What taxes the reader's patience the most, however, is that the vast weight of material is funnelled through such a restricted vision. Although Lennon chooses not to couch the narrative as unbroken, interior monologue, everything is filtered through Mailman's closely-guarded prejudices. When the reader of American fiction becomes party to the truly great Everymen of modern times - Updike's Rabbit, Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, Saul Bellow's Augie March, for example - you register the sense of having slipped into the collective American conscious. There is a danger that Mailman's collected gripes, by comparison, add up to little more than a long fit of pique. Lennon redeems himself, however, with an elegiac, hallucinatory coda as the hero sets off into the sunset. Suddenly the story acquires a surreal, Tales of Hoffmann dimension, as Mailman's romantic failures come back to haunt him. At the last you are exposed to the concealed humanity beneath the crusty shell. Terminally ill, and clinging to the shreds of a life hardly worth living, Mailman reflects, in a great final sentence, that "he would not object to a little more life". And in spite of the time he has spent both perplexing and provoking you, you would be extremely hard-hearted to begrudge him that. To order Mailman for pounds 13.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-lennon.1 Mailman (he does have a real name, which is Albert, but [J Robert Lennon] refers to him as Mailman throughout) has lived all his 57 years in Nestor, "a shabby outpost of divine oversight", and spent the last 30 of them working for the post office after his promising college career imploded. As a condition of his employment, he has been obliged to attend a course of anger-management sessions, which succeed only in winding him up further. The therapist comes to the conclusion that Mailman is "a cesspool of unfulfilled ambition" in which something vital is decaying: "Something died in you, Albert, which you failed to dispose of properly, and now is, if you will, stinking up your very self." What taxes the reader's patience the most, however, is that the vast weight of material is funnelled through such a restricted vision. Although Lennon chooses not to couch the narrative as unbroken, interior monologue, everything is filtered through Mailman's closely-guarded prejudices. When the reader of American fiction becomes party to the truly great Everymen of modern times - [John Updike]'s Rabbit, Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, Saul Bellow's Augie March, for example - you register the sense of having slipped into the collective American conscious. There is a danger that Mailman's collected gripes, by comparison, add up to little more than a long fit of pique. - Alfred Hickling.
Kirkus Review
The messy inner life of a thoroughly (but not murderously) disturbed postal employee is explored in the detail so loved by Richard Ford and J.D. Salinger. What is it about upstate New York? Surely, somewhere there are happy people living lives better than the vision of Joyce Carol Oates? Yes? Maybe not. The latest lugubrious wacko upstater to self-destruct under the microscope of a wry, gifted, but terminally pessimistic writer (The Light of Falling Stars, 1997, etc.) is late-boomer Albert Lippincott, child of world-class dysfunction, Dad a minor Princeton scientist, Mom a nymphomaniacal would-be torch singer, Sis a future very minor actress willing to strut her naked stuff in front of the brother she knows to be hiding under the bed. Albert's brilliant college career ended PDQ when, in the grip of an ecstatic understanding of the unifying theory of the universe, he attacked his excessively irritating, self-important, best-selling French physics professor and tried to bite his eyeball in the middle of a lecture. A brief stay in the loony bin led to gloomy romance and marriage with a psychiatric nurse and a job with the United States Postal Service (still just the P.O. at that time). It's been pretty much downhill ever since, until, at the turn of the century, divorced, living alone except for the crazed housecats bequeathed by a late girlfriend, Albert has succumbed to the unforgivable temptation of opening and reading the mail on his route. (The first letter opened was to the odious Professeur Renault.) Sometimes he even answers the letters. But the latest purloined correspondence has made unusual problems. Ripped in the opening, a hand-decorated envelope has proven impossible to reproduce, and its failure to arrive may have resulted in the suicide of its intended recipient, an artist even more cheerless than Albert. And now, as the postal inspectors close in on him, Albert's got this nasty lump growing on his chest. Sardonic fun for the young and pierced. Exhausting for the aged and experienced. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Only Lennon, the irrepressible author of books like The Funnies, could hang a tale on a brilliant if off-kilter mailman in search of love. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
