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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most Engaging and Exciting Novel I've Read in Years!,
By Cactus Ed (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mailman: A Novel (Hardcover)
I happened to have happened upon this book because of the title. You see, I...am...a...Mailman! Seriously! Thats what I do to make money to feed and shelter my family. I read the other reviews here and decided to get the book - and oh boy! am I not disappointed! This guy Lennon (John Lennon at that!) can write. He's amazingly perceptive of both outer descriptive elements and the inner worlds we all create and inhabit. As I've been reading I keep realizing that this novel is what it feels like to be me, a human being with constant inner dialogue and reminincing going on. Plot? I don't know nor do I care whether there's a plot to this story. The main character ("Mailman"!) is my hero, a fully-alive all-American (yes!) in the year 2000. He is wonderfully real, and I wonder how Lennon, who is only 32 or 33, does it. I am deeply impressed with his wisdom and writing ability. Incredible attention to detail, yet the story never bogs down in it. It moves right along, and I hope it never ends. Reading a novel like this is like being in love - rare and wonderful.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A journey into the soul and heart of a troubled man.,
By M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Mailman: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a smart, profound and sophisticated piece of work. Funny, and heartbreaking this book is just so ambitious in scope and range. But I'm stopping short of giving it five stars because I felt that parts of the story were a little overly developed, and in general, the novel was a little long. Still though, Mailman is a wonderful read, and in many ways is an absolutely powerful indictment of heartless tragedies that can exist in modern life and society. 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
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy this book (or at least get it from your local library),
By Brad Allen (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mailman: A Novel (Hardcover)
Take a break from the hegemony of the bestseller list and check out J. Robert Lennon's new novel, Mailman, his most complex and rewarding novel to date. Masterfully written, this is a funny yet thought provoking examination of the life and mind of a small town mailman. Lennon forces his readers to face the contradictions and hypocrisy normal human beings struggle with day to day in real life rather than offer easy, simple answers and one dimensional characters who always make the right decisions. Mailman is the best new novel I have read this fall. Go get yerself a copy of this book!
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