A blackly comic epic - a voyage through small-town America, and through the interior life of its most neurotic mailman. Albert Lippincott is a thirty-year veteran of the Nestor, New York, Post Office - a letter carrier extraordinaire, aggressively cheerful, obsessively efficient. But Albert has a few things to hide. His unfortunate habit, for instance, of reading other people's mail; his abortive university career, complete with a crackpot theory, a nervous breakdown and a thwarted attempt to bite out his professor's eye; a disastrous marriage, grotesquely self-absorbed parents and a sexually...