Mailman: A Novel [Paperback]

J. Robert Lennon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2004

"'Masterpiece' would be an exaggeration, but only a small one."—Andrew Ervin, Washington Post Book World

"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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393326071
• ISBN-13: 978-0393326079
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,195,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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!, December 28, 2003

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., November 12, 2003

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), October 10, 2003

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!