THE DELIVERY
By Peter Mendelsund
A young man fleeing political upheaval arrives in a prosperous city with nothing but the clothes on his back and a debt to be repaid for his passage. What does he do to survive?
Because it is the present, he works as a “delivery boy” for a Postmates-like service, one of the legions of worker ants on electric bikes who make possible civilized urban life as we have lately come to know it. And because “The Delivery” is a novel (an often exquisite one) by Peter Mendelsund, the book-cover designer and author of the metaliterary meditation “What We See When We Read,” the struggles of the unnamed delivery boy turn on questions of language: its hard-won acquisition, its inadequacies and its power to transport.
At the outset, the courier’s world consists of little more than numbers — numbered packages on warehouse shelves, destination addresses, stars from customers or lack thereof, tips. All else is mystery: “Customer 2 had smiled, and said something to him he hadn’t entirely understood. She looked the delivery boy briefly in his eyes, before closing the door.”
In lapidary chapters often just a few sentences long, Mendelsund conveys the worker’s nearly wordless attempts to simultaneously learn a language, a culture, an industry, a cityscape and its dangerous streets, and, perhaps most puzzling, the laws of social interaction. We learn about his circumscribed life at the warehouse, where he lives with the other delivery boys — never delivery men, no matter what age — in a bunkroom off the packaging floor, all laboring vainly to work off the cost of their beds, meals, bikes and phones, as well as the fare for their harrowing trip to what they had hoped was freedom. (There are delivery boys of even lower caste who ferry packages only from one warehouse to another; their tipless world is “like a closed vasculature.”)
The delivery boy has an ally, if a fickle one, in N., the dour, laconic dispatch girl from an “adjacent” homeland. When the mood strikes, she slips him more lucrative deliveries and feeds him tiny morsels of language, “only one sound at a time,” that make him feel “as if N. had somehow pumped extra blood into him.” He learns the rhythm of the streets: “I know when that car is going to pull out, he thought. / ‘… now.’ / (And it did.)” He savors and shares tiny triumphs: “Before kicking off, he took a moment to rub the bills between his fingers, enjoying their raggy suppleness.” And he tastes moments of freedom: “The sun came out. Having rolled up his sleeves at a traffic light, the delivery boy felt the hairs on his forearm ruffle.”
At the book’s hingepoint, the delivery boy, mustering his painstakingly accumulated linguistic, social and financial capital, speaks his heart to N., with catastrophic results. Still, he is entrusted with delivering a very important package to a distant location. As he heads out of the city on a boulevard that turns terrifyingly into a multilane highway, Mendelsund’s contained language takes flight. The delivery boy, “unarmored, on his puny bike, the stage much too large for his pitiable conveyance,” dodges “clanging metal giants” and a “muffler that one of the trucks had long ago sloughed off onto the roadside like a prehistoric shoulder bone,” until “the railings fell away, and he realized that he was on a ramp — no, a runway.”
Unfortunately, the novel picks up an annoying passenger: the narrator, who goes from unobtrusive chronicler to unruly guest at his own dinner party, sidetracking the reader with tales of his own unsettled adolescence and popping his head through the fourth wall to undercut his increasingly parenthesis-saddled account of the delivery boy’s adventures. The book — each section of which opens with an epigram from Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” — eventually bogs down in philological digression.
Despite the overreach, Mendelsund shines a piercing light on a bottom-rung existence. As delivery takes on a meaning closer to grace, you root hard for the deliverer.
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