The Delivery: A Novel

by Peter Mendelsund

Overview

Enter the world of the Delivery Boy, who must pedal his way to five-star customer ratings—and, perhaps, freedom—in novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund’s The Delivery.

Countries go wrong sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country—a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong.

In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: a member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic, hoping for a decent tip and a five-star rating.

He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he’s not yet a Delivery Man, though he’ll have to man up if he wants to impress N., the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English.

Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor, get the girl, and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever have a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who’s telling this story, anyway?

Harrowing and hilarious, The Delivery is a fable for and about our times: an exploration of the ways language and commerce unite and isolate every one of us, native and immigrant both.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250829610
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	02/08/2022
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,098,468
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Peter Mendelsund is a novelist, a graphic designer, and the creative director of The Atlantic. He is the author of the novel Same Same as well as several books about literature and the visual imagination.

Editorial Reviews

Often exquisite . . . the struggles of the unnamed delivery boy turn on questions of language: its hard-won acquisition, its inadequacies and its power to transport . . . 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.”
—Andy Newman, The New York Times Book Review

“Mendelsund’s triumph . . . is the active collaboration between his new novel’s subject and its physical form. This relationship between the way words are arranged on the page and their connotative meanings gives The Delivery’s economy an Odyssean intensity . . . glaringly innovative . . . Mendelsund artfully transfigures [the novel].”
—Alessandro Tersigni, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Like a symphony played by various instruments . . . The Delivery more than delivers. I was enthralled—perhaps transported is a better word—from the first page right through to the magical conclusion.”
—Amanda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Like a millennial Franz Kafka . . . Peter Mendelsund plumbs the absurdities of our society . . . [and] examines the existential despair (and bleak funniness) of the gig economy.”
—The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of 2021)

“A timely exploration of alienation and power . . . Brilliant . . . As the delivery boy acquires this new tongue and awareness, the paragraphs grow longer and shapelier . . . An elegant, if somber, parable.”
—Kirkus

“[The Delivery] is not only a parable of contemporary capitalism but also a wonderful story, one that . . . launches into a magnificent final act. This is an assured, hugely enjoyable novel full of grace and wit from a writer with a unique vision of what fiction can be.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Mendelsund explores identity, community, and the past’s power to influence the future in his stunning latest . . . The author’s playful sense of form and command of language make for an original and provocative novel.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Peter Mendelsund’s The Delivery is not only truly original, and gorgeously written, it shines a light on a person, a population, generally invisible to all but themselves, which is among a novel’s more profound purposes. It’s a remarkable book.”
—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

“Reading The Delivery is an experience like no other, as though you are listening to a recital that becomes a kind of rich and sentient dream. It is a novel of coldness and warmth, loneliness and consanguinity, and ultimately, great freedom.”
—Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

“The infrastructure that delivers us anything we want, whenever we want it, is the work of millions of anonymous hands, millions of people—mostly unseen, mostly unthanked—who pop up and then disappear. In a quick, staccato style, Peter Mendelsund's haunting fable mirrors these movements, building and building to a startlingly full portrait a world that we too often let flash us by.”
—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work

“An intricate fugue, a trickle that gradually builds into a torrent, Mendelsund’s astonishing novel is as much a meditation on the capacities of narrative itself—its unanticipated deliverances—as a subtle reflection on the contemporary migration crisis. With its resonant tale of upheaval and adaptation, precarity and solidarity, The Delivery is a parable for our age.”
—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora

From the Publisher

2020-11-18
A beguiling sophomore novel by noted graphic designer Mendelsund, a timely exploration of alienation and power.

When Mendelsund’s novel opens, a young man known only as “the delivery boy” is riding down the streets of some unknown city. The Kafkaesque anonymity is appropriate, for no character has a name; the closest such thing is the moniker “Wodge,” used for a co-worker “born in a trash heap,” and the delivery boy isn’t sure whether it’s a given name or not. He has a limited command of the language, which Mendelsund, in a brilliant visual turn, signals by single-line paragraphs, most of them quite simple: “Little-to-no traffic. Few customers.” The delivery boy lives and breathes by tips, but more by customer reviews, and if less than stellar, then the Inquisitor—beg pardon, the Supervisor—intervenes: “The Supervisor took you into the office with the barred door if he became aware of negative comments.” The Supervisor is the seat of all power, a man of reptilian gaze who worries toothpicks so much that his jaw muscles bulge. The delivery boy has one sort-of friend, N., a woman who corrects his English (“Gro-ss. It means vomit”) but seems caught up in the Supervisor’s web. That nexus remains mysterious even as we learn that the delivery boy is not without his resources: He had been a student of languages in his unnamed homeland, and he begins to piece together words and phrases: “ ‘Asswipe.’ He tried the word out, quietly, to himself. He knew the word sideswipe, and wondered.” As the delivery boy acquires this new tongue and awareness, the paragraphs grow longer and shapelier, but this doesn't necessarily mean he’ll ever be free of debt to be repaid to the company: As the book ends, he doesn't know whether he’ll ever be happy or at home in this new land, only that he has the wretched capacity “to go on endlessly if necessary, on and on.”

A timely critique of corporate vassalage in the form of an elegant, if somber, parable.

Kirkus Reviews