THE DELIVERY

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.