Mailman - Tapa dura

Mailman Albert Lippincott delivers mail from the Nestor, New York post office. He has been doing the job for years (he is now 57), but is still cheerful and efficient despite some odd habits, such as reading other people's mail and hoarding his own. We learn more and more about his life and his unrewarding university career where he nearly bit out his professor's eye. Everything seems to go wrong for Albert, and he has a disastrous marriage, plus a sexually embarrassing encounter with his melodramatic sister, not forgetting his awkward time with his cats. There is no end to it all - it is a truly bleak black comedy written with huge verve and enormous skill. It is a wild story which I read avidly; Albert is a truly great character.

A blackly comic epic - a voyage through small-town America, and through the interior life of its most neurotic mailman. Albert Lippincott is a thirty-year veteran of the Nestor New York Post Office - a letter carrier extraordinaire, aggressively cheerful, obsessively efficient. But Albert has a few things to hide. His unfortunate habit, for instance, of reading other people's mail. His abortive university career, complete with a crackpot theory, a nervous breakdown, and a thwarted attempt to bite out his professor's eye. A disastrous marriage, grotesquely self-absorbed parents, and a sexually ambiguous entanglement with his melodramatic sister. And then there's his attempt to reform the postal system of Kazakhstan, and his complicated relationship with his cats. And now his supervisors are on to his letter-opening compulsion, there's a throbbing pain under his left arm, and he is finding it increasingly difficult to contain his emotions. Things are closing in on Albert, and he is forced to confront, once and for all, his life's failures. Albert Lippincott is a brilliant creation: flawed, damaged, but fiercely perceptive, and desperate to make meaning out of the mess of existence. He, and Lennon, hold us captive with a wild narrative voice fuelled by desperation and touched by madness.