The Delivery
By Peter Mendelsund
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Peter Mendelsund’s new novel, The Delivery, is for most of its length a lean, sweaty, hungry thing, the story of an unnamed immigrant delivery boy in an unnamed big, fierce city. Mendelsund adopts a telegraphic style, with page after page filled with one-sentence paragraphs separated by dashes. At roughly the book’s half-way mark, actual prose starts to infiltrate the narrative and slow it down, but before that it races breathlessly along with the delivery boy on his rounds.

It’s a grim enough world. He lives in the delivery company’s dank headquarter (as do the other deliverers) and is sent out on his runs by N., the blunt, smart dispatch girl who also irregularly coaches the delivery boy in the idioms of his new land. The warehouse is overseen by a brutish supervisor who functions as a kind of ogre ex machina, but in that first half readers are mostly on the road with the delivery boy as he pushes his motorized bike through city traffic in all weathers. “Often there is no other way to go than via the busiest of the broad avenues. This time of day, they are always like this. Jammed up,” the description runs at one point. “The number of vehicles intensified the heat. The rain had long since become steam, sweat, or just weight.”

Readers learn the delivery boy’s story through an unnamed older narrator who seems to share a similar background; “it is not difficult for me to imagine this life,” this narrator relates, keeping his protagonist to a steady, sardonic estimation. “I mean,” he writes, “neither was he an awesome kind of famous genius, brought low by circumstances.” Readers are periodically reminded that although the narrator is aware of every nuance of the delivery boy’s story, the delivery boy himself is a bit of a dim bulb:

The delivery boy was, then, at the very top of a hill - the highest point in the city. And if he had enjoyed even a little bit of self-possession in that moment he might have looked around him and seen the entire city laid out as a map, hatched with streets that sloped gently toward the bay, where the ferries and recreational boats began their journeys under the dark spans and up the middle of the bright river, which thrust out north toward Manor Grove and beyond. But he hadn’t, and so he didn’t.

Since we never know anything personal about this arch narrator (we hear in indistinct terms of desperate, dissident parents: “the kerchiefs and caps, and now, from this vantage even further removed, I can hear the speeches given, blocs formed, positions seconded, or mooted, manifestos signed, pledges inducted, bright futures foretold”), all of these little jabs at the poor hard-working delivery boy feel unfair, however prettily phrased, although the narrator’s occasional strained sympathies with his younger counterpart soften the picture. The delivery boy, the narrator reflects, “spoke, as I myself now speak: an amputee language - a language in which whole tenses had been lopped off, a language of the present only - a language that subsequently required an even newer, supplementary, makeshift language; prosthetic, and ill-equipped for mourning.” 

At the half-way point, The Delivery changes. The telegraphic jottings of the delivery boy’s scattershot adventures are replaced with standard prose; the bleak quotidia of his existence is replaced with a plot. He’s romantically attracted to N., skims from his tips to buy her a gift, is discovered by the supervisor, and is sent on a very long and very mysterious run by N., who loads him with boxes he’s forbidden to open and who sends him far from the city, to a place where “the air smelled of lavender and lawns,” and where, among other calamities, prose like this is suddenly possible:

... and what happened next is a little bit cloudy, though you would think that it - this part, all of it - would be the clearest of everything, as it was the real beginning of the end - the moment of revelation - but, strangely, no: it isn’t clear at all, and of course (of course) a story (or a memory) is not a transcript (quite obviously), or, if it is, it is a transcript, then the stenographer would be drunk, the stenotype compromised, the jury bought, the lawyers incoherent, the testimony wildly biased …

In this faraway location, the delivery boy has some harrowing misadventures and feels a bone-deep dislocation. “He considered that the world felt strange,” we’re told, “as if it had committed a solecism, and that any action he might take henceforth would be declined as an irregular verb might.” 

When the delivery boy finally, inevitably opens his mysterious payload, readers come almost literally to the novel’s last five pages, and those pages present a real problem for any book reviewer who’s rightly worried about spoiling trick endings. It’s possible that Mendelsund saw the revelations of those five pages as some kind of neato-keeno clever twist, perhaps some meta-smart reflection on The Refugee Experience. But they are in fact a total betrayal of all the attention the reader has paid out in order to reach them. Those final five pages profane the spare eloquence of the book’s first half, completely explode any sympathy engendered by the book’s second half, and gut the whole point of telling this story in the first place. 

That’s no mean feat for only a handful of pages, and it turns any verdict on the book into some kind of mulish enigma. What’s a reviewer to say? The Delivery is an almost addictively engaging book, and that’s why you shouldn’t read it? 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.