Lost in the Post
J. Robert Lennon's fourth novel is an epic of contemporary America seen through the
eyes of the eponymous Mailman, a postman who takes his job very seriously,
but also a neurotic lower-middle-class American man (male / man!) handicapped by
his autobiography. The tensions between these two identities, and the double life they
necessitate on the part of the central character, are deftly handled, as we see the world
primarily through one perspective but are continually, uneasily reminded throughout
the novel of the shadowy presence of the other. And this is a long, absorbing novel,
sometimes disturbing in its analysis of a particular practitioner of contemporary
American habits.
Mailman is Albert Lippincott, who semi-obsessively relates to us through interior
monologues and extended narrational turns his life history, his world view, his
oddball understanding of what is normal, and his combined professional sense of duty
and self-importance. Mailman shares some characteristics with other great mavericks
of modern American fiction, combining elements of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J.
Reilly, Joseph Heller's Yossarian and Thomas Pynchon's Oedipa Maas into a new
figure of American paranoia. Mailman is however distinctively comic in his
construction and tragic in his outlook, a product of the world he comes to condemn,
and Lennon's style is wholly his own, confident in its handling of its themes, at once
persuasively meandering in its detail and assured in its ultimate direction.
Mailman lives in Nestor, New York, and delivers mail daily to its residents,
whose most intimate secrets are of course divulged in their mail. How and why he
accesses this information, where he puts it and what he does with it, constitute a
significant part of the narrative, but Mailman is much more concerned with
establishing and mapping out the causes of its hero's chronic anomie, and with
suggesting this as a diagnosis of contemporary American cultural myopia.
Mailman himself comes to epitomise the small-town values (insularity, self-
righteousness, an inviolable sense of his own correctness, tempered by sometimes
painful insecurity and anxiety alongside a continually resurgent inferiority complex)
that have made him what he is. The dynamic tensions between these aspects of his
character, and between his past lives and his current activities, provide much of the
allure of this powerful novel. J. Robert Lennon has created a character with whom we
can sympathise and against whom, simultaneously, we must protest. Mailman has
enough depth and complexity of character to allow his narrative to be convincing, and
enough self-blindness to be worryingly realistic. Early in the novel we are told of his
nervous breakdown and the theory that initiated it:
The theory (as far as he can remember now) was that everything
small was a mirror of something large and everything large a
mirror of something small, that the world that could not be seen because it
was tiny was the same as the world that could not be seen for its
hugeness: and human beings were the fulcrum of the scale of the universe;
before civilisation they were far enough away from the large and the small to
render each invisible, but with the dawn of civilisation exactly close
enough to the large and small to make both out.
The theory serves to locate Mailman's sometimes psychotic take on the world in
egomaniacal psychological terms, even as it offers an allegorical possibility for the
novel itself, in which the (tiny) individual clearly mirrors the (immense) social and
vice versa. Mailman's double life offers a penetrating critique of American social
hypocrisy, embroiled in its own weird narrative, reluctant to respond to much outside
of itself, and forced, eventually, to go on the run in search of escape from itself and
the world it has made.
During a chapter entitled ‘The Postman of Uchqubat' Mailman relates to us his
disastrous sojourn in Kazakhstan (the first attempt to escape), ostensibly to help set up
a postal service to contribute to the country's reconstruction post-Soviet Union. What
becomes apparent, though, is that Mailman's very remembering of this period in his
life depends heavily on it containing one of his sexual relationships, the narratives of
which offer some kind of structure to his otherwise sprawling self-analyses. Narrative
descriptions of local Kazakh colour fade in relation to his brief romance with Marsha,
although the horrific resolution of this episode lends further force to
Mailman's tragic potential.
Mailman's emphasis on his sexual history develops out of the broad theme that
orchestrates Lennon's writing in this novel, which is to do with communication
between people. To understate matters somewhat, Albert Lippincott finds
communication difficult in ways for which only his persona as Mailman can
compensate him. The novel plays all manner of games with the potential that the mail
system offers in terms of communication as a symbolic representation of human
society itself.
One of many rants that punctuate the novel rails against linguistic and
typographic standards in his local newspaper: "Words, letters used to matter: which
ones you chose to print or say. Not anymore: everybody sounds like everybody else,
they're all using the same vocabulary they got from television advertising." Later,
trouble with a schoolteacher leads to confusion between faked love letters and faked
grades: "'You wrote those letters.' ‘Youwrote them! You wrote them in your
gradebook!'" Marsha leaves a note to finish their relationship, and his wife terminates
their marriage following instructions in a book called Just Say It, which is
precisely what Mailman, as narrator and performer of his own life, can't quite bring
himself to do. "It is all -- isn't it? -- mail", he concludes. But not, we might add, his
mail.
Mailman is a compelling read, a dense and enthralling indictment of a
culture on the brink of moral implosion, redeemed only to the extent that it can say,
with Mailman himself, "I love life. I love it", in the face of its own relentless failure to
love life enough.
— 12 January 2004
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