The Delivery by Peter Mendelsund

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 9, 2021

Over the course of The Delivery, we learn that the character known only as the delivery boy came from another country, a nation ruled by a leader he calls “the Stongman.” The delivery boy was smuggled to the United States and must eventually repay the cost of his passage and bicycle repairs and rent for the bunk on which he sleeps. He knows his debt will never be paid but he dutifully makes bicycle deliveries while he learns English and the ways of American consumers, one delivery after another, each described to varying degrees, some routine, others an adventure.

This delivery boy, like all the others, is known only as the delivery boy, just as Supervisor is known only as Supervisor and the manager is known only as Uncle. It seems that people who are smuggled into the country are not entitled to an invidual identity, but are part of an amorphous mass. The delivery boy lives in fear of the Supervisor, who controls his fate. If customers make too many complaints, the delivery boy might be fired and lose his only means of survival as an undocumented alien. He also has a not-so-secret crush on N., the dispatcher from his native country who also controls his fate by giving him easier or more difficult assignments. For the most part, N. acts if the delivery does not exist apart from his job, although he assigns deep meaning to her occasional acts of kindness.

The delivery boy seems to have accepted his life and does not feel much sorrow when, for example, he loses his lighter, because it is just another hardship, “another lost article in a long list of lost articles.” He accepts rude drivers and rule doormen and rude customers as if they are his due, but he feels a sense of wonder when he receives a good tip or a kind word, the same wonder he feels when he pauses during the day to look around, to appreciate beauty and to marvel at the way other people live.

The Delivery is a charming novel. The simplicity of the story hides its depth. Many background details are omitted — in what city does the delivery boy make his deliveries? what is his country of origin? — because they don’t really matter. The delivery boy is an every-delivery-boy, an undocumented worker who is readily exploited, performing unrewarding labor that leaves him unnoticed, unable to image a better life for himself (beyond imagining that N. might one day like him) because his life, unsatisfying though it might be, is better than the lives his parents face under the rule of the Strongman.

The delivery boy’s hopes and aspirations, small though they might be, are touching. Like all immigrants, his ultimate yearning is to be free — free from the Strongman, free from the Supervisor, free from those who would exploit or control the vulnerable. The novel’shopeful ending suggests the possibility that by taking a chance — another chance, apart from being smuggled into a free country — the delivery boy might ultimately attain his dream.

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