Customer Reviews

Mailman

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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!

Writing a novel which delves into the inner psychic state of the main character as his life dissolves around him requires verve and imagination. That Lennon can bring it off - striding the fine line between self-indulgence and insight - is testimony to his skill as a novelist.

If you live in a college town, you will recognize the familiar cast of misfits, academic wannabes and blue collar workers all trying to ply their trade against the background swagger of the SUV-owning students.

Lennon captures it all - Mailman is perverse and brilliant and the sharpest writing you will find anywhere. Highly recommended.

With much literary fiction, I find myself skimming, but not at all with MAILMAN -- it holds the reader's attention by being filled with beauty, emotions and reminscence, and still moving at a steady suspenseful pace. I felt myself reading and enjoying every word.

Albert Lippincott is a man whose longings we feel, whose past we are intrigued by, and yet, to the customers whose mail he delivers, he is simply an anonymous Mailman. When he starts to read their mail, in one case slowing its delivery and possibly affecting a life -- and when a witness then complains about it -- we know trouble may be nigh. But there is so much more to MAILMAN.

I took this on a trip to Vermont with me and finished it at home in my cozy apartment. I thank Mr. Lennon for providing me good reading, and I'm not one who has a lot of patience with most literary fiction.

This is a clever and enjoyable book from an extremely talented young author. After having read this and the more lighthearted (but equally well-written) THE FUNNIES, I can't wait to see more from him!

This novel is a very contemporary American story, and to be pretty irreverent, is an uneasy hybrid of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers." Albert's life is one unending chain of uncomfortable moments and irritating distractions, sort of a neurotic nightmare, and yet a caricature of my own life. And by being a caricature of it, it allows me to laugh at myself a little more. And since I do see myself in Mailman, not something every reader will as much (fortunately for you) I am glad to be able to laugh. Albert Lippincot, our supremely frustrated protagonist, is a little bit of each of us; and Lennon seeks to allow me to make peace with that part. God bless you, Mr. Lennon.

Lennon's prose is remarkable. His characterization skills are great, and he gives a feel for the world through one man's eyes that is both perceptive and which transmits pages in a few choice words.

And a side note: Lennon's portrait of Albert's hometown of Nestor, New York, (loosely based on Ithaca, home of Lennon and of Cornell University) as Liberal Collegetown U.S.A. is so very dead on. I think that may be a block to some readers; if you haven't seen that phenomenon of the American college town, you may not believe how humorous a place it can be. Lennon looks at that self-absorbed, perpetually adolescent world with a wry humor. Me, I have been through it, and I share the same anguished chuckle along with the vegan pagans, or those who are self-possesssed enough to laugh at themselves.

If you enjoyed this, my first recommendation would be "Adios Scheherezade," an early work of Donald Westlake which had aspirations toward serious literature, but mostly wound up with hilarity. Kind of like my life. I'd also recommend "Girlfriend in a Coma" by Douglas Coupland.

I've finished the book but can't seem to get it out of my head. As a mail carrier myself, Lipton really gets inside the mentality of what carrying mail does to your brain. Very, very few of us ever commit the dastardley deed that Alfred does....but many of have thought about it.

If you enjoyed Charles Bukowski's Post Office, this is a must read.

If you don't work for the USPS but love a well detailed fantasy ride inside someone's head read it also. The chapter on the ill-fated Peace Corp incursion is well worth the trip.

I was at a used book sale, when I saw this book on sale for a dollar. Being a mailman myself, I figured I'd take a chance and spend a buck on it. It turned out to be a dollar well spent. The main character is a 57 year old letter carrier named Albert Lippincott, who is usually referred to as Mailman. Albert has a habit of taking his customers' mail home and reading it before he delivers it, and that bad habit soon catches up with him. As his life falls apart, Albert looks back at the mess he has made of his life; his failed relationships with women, his nervous breakdown in college, his aborted spint in the Peace Corps, etc. Albert isn't a very good person, but he is a good character. I enjoyed reading this funny tragedy.

I read this book after getting hooked on Lennon's serial story currently running in Harper's magazine. I found Mailman disturbing, but like other reviewers, I found myself relating intimately to some of the thoughts going through Albert's head. This made it all the more disturbing as I began to see the world with Albert's neurotic vision. 'It's only a book,' I'd remind myself as if I were a kid watching Frankenstein for the first time. The novels comedy is well done. I couldn't help but compare it to the comedy of silent films in general and Buster Keaton in particular. The protagonist's neurosis, or whatever it is, is unrelenting to the point where some will wish that Lennon would just get on with it. I found some of the descriptive passages unnecessary. They neither contributed to the setting, the mood or the plot of the piece. Perhaps I felt this way because reading it was a bit like wading against a current. I kept thinking there will be an epiphany for this guy. It ended like a modern symphonic work: disonant with the resolving note left to us.

This may not be a bad book for a book club selection as I think it would be interesting to discuss and listen to what others thought of it. But it is not a book for those who like their reading with at least some sacharin.

In conclusion, Lennon is a writer of great strength and I look forward to his future efforts.

Mailman will enthrall you. It will leave you craving more even when the book sadly comes to an end. J. Robert Lennon makes you feel as though you are right there with Mailman on his crazy adventures. Perhaps there's a little bit of Mailman in all of us. Excellent novel. Excellent author.