This article is a preview from the Spring 2020 edition of New Humanist
Mailman (Granta) by J. Robert Lennon
Like many people raised in the early 1990s, my introduction to postal literature came via Janet and Allen Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman, or, Other People’s Letters (1986). Appealing to children’s innate fascination with prying on private words, the book invited readers to spy on letters addressed to famous fictional characters: an apology from Goldilocks; a solicitor’s note to The Big Bad Wolf. As a student, I endured Charles Bukowski’s altogether less child-friendly Post Office (1971). Only later, immersed in adulthood and its attendant disappointments, did I discover J. Robert Lennon’s Mailman (2003). In this madcap, clammy novel of misanthropy and misfortune – with its themes of failure, competition and (mis)communication – I felt I had found “the one”.
Recently re-released by Granta as an “outsider classic”, Lennon’s novel is set in Nestor, New York and tells the story of lonely, disappointed (but determined) middle-ager Albert Lippincott, whom we come to know simply as “Mailman”. He does his job with diligence, but likes to siphon off letters here and there, steaming them open to read before they eventually reach their recipients. It all seems rather harmless, but when Mailman holds on a little too long to a potentially life-saving note for a suicidal artist, who dies without receiving it, his world starts to quake. Hounded by a tell-tale neighbour and sensing the authorities closing in, he sets out on the run – from himself, his failings and the postal powers that be.
The novel opens in the year 2000 and we learn of Mailman’s dysfunctional family (his disturbingly sexualised bond with his sister), his sad academic career (in which a manic episode of seeming epiphany leads him to try to bite his supervisor), his failed relationships (multiple), and his micro-frustrations (manifold). One such frustration is the decline of decent communication. Indeed, Mailman harbours an almost Habermasian concern for the public sphere. He is troubled by the death of conversation (“just a couple of unconnected monologues”), let down by his local paper, and rails at the inanity of bumper stickers (“people choose to voice only those opinions that can be summed up in a four-by-sixteen-inch space and cannot be refuted or debated, since they are . . . on the back of a moving car”). One dares to wonder what he might today make of social media and safe-space culture; he is most certainly – to use a bumper sticker-esque term of the type he would loathe – “problematic”. However, he is also strangely sympathetic; fragile, alone, wanting more.
According to the anger therapist to whom he is referred by his employer, Mailman holds within him a “cesspool . . . of unfulfilled ambition”. Indeed, his sister fears that he might “go postal”, which, it turns out, is no joke. The term refers to anger-turned-violence in the workplace and emerged in late 20th century America, after a series of cases in which postal workers shot and killed their colleagues. But whilst Mailman dislikes aspects of his work and realises the “fact of his expendability – of the interchangeability of all mailmen”, he ultimately holds hope that it has meaning. In this, he sits somewhere between the miserable mailman of Bukowski’s autobiographical work, which opens with the words, “It began as a mistake”, and the proud, real mailman John Fuller, featured in Studs Terkel’s oral history triumph Working (1974): “I feel it is one of the most respected professions . . . You’re doing a job for the public and a job for the country.” Indeed, when Lennon’s Mailman joins a Peace Corps mission to Kazakhstan, he harbours secret hopes of reinvigorating its postal service on the side: “what democratic nation could exist without a postal service,” he wonders, rhetorically.
It’s interesting to consider the ways in which Mailman’s complex attitude to work and vocation differs from those found in more contemporary American fiction, where we find young people – increasingly, women – disillusioned almost from the get-go. The existentially exhausted protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), reflects, upon leaving her job: “There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing.” Similarly, in Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019), lonely temp Millie numbs herself with boxsets and booze, and thinks, “Better to be sick like I am now than to be out not accomplishing what I thought I might accomplish.” Exhausted by precarity and the tedium of selling the self, these young “protagonists” (the word seems odd, with its presumption of agency) are agonisingly aware of the pitfalls of seeking self-actualisation through tedious, miserable work.
Yet these themes of competition, work and refusal are, of course, nothing new. In J. D. Salinger’s Franny (1955), for example, a young woman despairs that “I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all.” The reply comes: “You sure you’re not just afraid of competing?” In a similar, more reflexive vein, Mailman considers why he never took classes on car repair: “The truth is that he feared being the only intelligent person there, and feared even more deeply that despite this presumed advantage he would be the worst student, thus calling into question the most-intelligent status he so feared in the first place.” He shows deeply human ambivalence towards competing and “opting-in”. In one tragi-comic scene, he listens mockingly to a local radio quiz, before realising that he knows the winning answer. Leaping from his truck, he forces a woman from a payphone so that he can dial in. But when he receives a prize – a camera – it disappoints him. “To think he was excited about winning – what a sucker!” he thinks. Still, it doesn’t stop him from taking pictures. Indeed, Mailman is no neat misanthrope. “I tried to do a lot of things and they didn’t work out,” he says towards the end. “That’s all.”
Reading Mailman today reminds us that the themes associated with “millennial” fiction – anxiety, ambivalence, failure, rage – are not so new after all. Lennon’s novel is vivacious, weird, morally challenging and all the better for it. By the story’s end, unwell and appraising the sum of his existence, Mailman decides that he would not, in fact, “object to a little bit more life”. “Problematic” though he may be, I would certainly not object to a little more Mailman in mine.
