Fiction: Now that e-mail and mobile phone texting have replaced the more traditional methods of communication, that most civilised of forms, the handwritten letter, is rapidly becoming lost for ever, writes Eileen Battersby.
But postal deliveries remain a lifeline and the postman, who has long outlived the milkman, retains his role in society. Whereas the policeman represents the harsher face of authority, the postman, despite the bills he carries, is a figure of trust, a routine, kindly presence -disliked only by the family pet and that out of deference to tradition.
The postman is the guardian of our privacy, so the notion that he might read our mail is one of the final outrages left in a world in which just about every outrage has already been committed.
J. Robert Lennon's fourth book, Mailman, takes as its central character an employee of the United States Postal service - Albert Lippincott who has spent more than 30 years delivering the mail in the town of Nestor in upstate New York. And the mail is important, governments may fall, trains run late, but as Lennon records: "The mail privileges, it compels. It can make or ruin your day."
Lippincott is neither bored not embittered. He appears efficient, and eager, still happy to sort his deliveries, man his van and ensure the delivery runs on time. The only catch is that he has acquired the habit of not only reading the letters he is paid to deliver, he also Xeroxes them and has collected boxes of these copies. Aside from that, Albert, known largely throughout the narrative as Mailman, is a man at the mercy of several cats, remorse about his failed marriage, a bewildering relationship with his failed actress sister and memories of a non-maternal mother.
As the novel opens, Mailman is on edge, desperate to be the 10th caller on a radio quiz show. The prize is pathetic, a breakfast voucher, but it means a great deal to Mailman. Lennon makes it clear that his central character is a guy with problems, most of them caught up with the other bits of chaos drifting through his mind. At 57, old Albert remains a boy who never quite grew up. His thoughts revolve upon his memories of a messy past and his preoccupation with an increasingly messy present.
In early confirmation of his somewhat off-kilter approach to life, Mailman almost loses control of himself when he sees a woman using the public phone that he needs in order to make contact with the radio station. It is a good comic set piece in a novel of sufficiently good comic set pieces to ensure the pace seldom falters. Interestingly, the novel improves through the development of Albert's character, or rather, the pieced-together story of his life as it is gradually revealed.
Nothing ever went Mailman's way - not now and not as a boy who fell too fully under the influence of Gillian, his crazy sister, while all the time being emotionally batted away by a mother too intent on becoming a cabaret star to bother with her son's needs.
From the daily trials of the adult Mailman hoping to evade detection as a mail sneak thief to the flashbacks in time featuring the confused young boy who becomes the failed university student attacking his professor before suffering a breakdown from which rescue comes in the form of a nurse who later marries him , Lennon is carefully plotting Albert's journey .
Lennon is having fun with one of the great themes of US fiction, the dysfunctional family at large. In addition to Mom the cabaret singer is Dad, a former university professor who on early retirement appears not so much to lose his mind but drift slowly away from it and everyday life. In the Gillian sequences, the novel initially acquires a crudeness that does not prepare the reader for the humanity of Lennon's later handling of the relationship between a brother and sister who as doomed children begin the inevitable odyssey towards failed adulthood.
But behind the laughs, most notably a tremendously funny nightmare stint with the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, there is the very sad story of Mailman, a bright individual who is condemned to an existence distorted by his obsessive need for, and failure to find, love. Above all, and this is where Lennon proves surprisingly good, there is Albert's powerful and weighty fear.
Again, very early in the book, Albert on the run from detection and but one of the many disasters that befall him, experiences a panic attack. He runs to his car: "Do I cry now? Do I? Yes: he sobs and sobs. Please help me, his lips are saying, but there is nothing here to help, there is only his heart, pulsating like an alien outside the window, trying to break in, to find the bloody hole it came out of." It's a strong image, almost a motif, making it possible for Lennon to achieve some of the later narrative tone shifts.
It is a sad book, but it is also funny.It is also very long, perhaps too long and is an entertainingly good, but not great, second-string US novel, marred by a weak, unconvincing conclusion. That said, Mailman is far better than Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Lennon's achievement lies in the creation of the slowly dying Albert Lippincott, intelligent but doomed, always believable, never a parody.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Mailman By J. Robert Lennon Granta, 483pp, £10