A Letter Marked Personal

Overview

A Letter Marked Personal is J.P. Donleavy’s last novel, completed in 2007. Set in New York, it relates the interior monologue of forty-nine-year-old Nathan Langriesh Johnson, the founder of a successful lingerie company. Nathan began his career as a door-to-door lingerie salesman, his wares consisting of imitations of European designs. Now ‘a confirmed social climber’, Nathan distracts himself with remembered or imagined comments by his wife, Iowa the model, Reginald the accountant and Hal the realtor, and reminisces about the struggle before his business took off. A letter marked ‘personal’ arrives at Nathan’s high-rise Manhattan apartment, and is opened by ‘the wife’: his life unravels. This portrait of a flawed sycophant is full of Donleavy’s wit and insight. Tracing a journey from Nathan’s aspirational greed to his realization of the pointlessness of his vanity, this is a poignant story of a man at the end of his days, reflecting upon the futility of human wishes.

Reviews

"Long anticipated, finally delivered." —Bill Dunn, The Irish Times

"Donleavy’s final novel is a more than worthy addition to his canon." —Pat Party, Hot Press

"In A Letter Marked Personal J.P. Donleavy has given us his valedictory novel and left us with reminders of his lyrical style, colourful characterisation, black humour and that he is saying something fundamental about the human condition." —Colin Overall, Books Ireland

"Donleavy was very much a part of the small Dublin bohemia … who kept alive a spirit of irreverence, invention and free thought that stopped Ireland from succumbing to complete stultification." —The Irish Times

"Reading Mr Donleavy is no longer like being dragged into a beer-brawl in some violent Irish pub, but more like sitting down to an evening of good whiskey and mad laughter in a rare conversation somewhere on the edge of reality." —Hunter S Thompson

Author Biography

J.P. ‘Mike’ Donleavy (1926–2017) wrote more than twenty books after The Ginger Man, including The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968), A Fairy Tale of New York (1973), The Onion Eaters (1971) and Schultz (1979) (all available as eBooks from Lilliput), along with several works of non-fiction such as The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners (1975). He lived along the shores of Lough Owel near Mullingar in County Westmeath.