MixedChicago Review of Books... frustrating, but...thought-provoking ... The unconventional use of syntax slows the pace of the book, and imitates the rote, hurry-up-and-wait work of the protagonist ... the story of the narrator is in many ways more descriptive than the story of the book’s ostensible protagonist. The book never fills in key details about the Delivery Boy (his name, most notably), instead opting for a conscious erasure of the character. Just as the Delivery Boy is invisible to the customers he serves, he is invisible to us, the readers. In the end, Mendelsund is more interested in exploring the complexities of narrative and less so about fleshing out the life of his protagonist ... A reader’s enjoyment of The Delivery will mostly depend on if they share Mendelsund’s interest in these meta-fictional techniques. For my part, I found the most damning failure of the book was that its method of erasure-as-portrayal extended to its discussion of migration within the Delivery Boy’s life ... Rendering the book ahistorical necessarily leaves it apolitical as well. There isn’t any specific story the book wants to tell about the political violence in the protagonist’s past, nor is there any apparent relationship between his home country and the metropole. It’s disappointing that this book has nothing of substance to say about, for instance, the over ten million undocumented immigrants working in the US today in similar conditions to the book’s protagonist. The Delivery is a unique novel that devises clever ways to tell its story, but fails to ground itself in basic techniques of character development and plot. This experimental novel creates a compelling new world, but it’s hard to parse what exactly it wants to say about ours.
