A Letter Marked Personal

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-eight-year-old Nathan Langriesh Johnson, the founder of a successful lingerie company.

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`Nathan Langriesh Johnson is the name. The United States my nation, From Maine to Florida. From New York to California. I am its loyal citizen. And before I am homeless out on the street, I am, without slipping and breaking my neck, going to wash my face in semi-cold water.’

Nathan Johnson, forty-eight and restless, began his career as a door-to-door lingerie salesman, reaching the top of the rag trade with a penthouse overlooking Manhattan. A `confirmed social climber’ in 1990s New York City, he looks back on his early struggles, indulging fantasies of life as a country squire on Blueberry Hill – the Westchester estate he buys his wife Muriel as a birthday present. He meets a model from Iowa, different from the rest, and is captivated. When, out of the blue, a letter marked `personal’ arrives, his wife opens it and life unravels.

A Letter Marked Personal is J.P.Donleavy’s final novel, completed in 2007. His portrait of a flawed Anglophile delineates the American Dream, from aspirational greed to the vanity of human wishes. This poignant story of Nathan’s rise and demise speaks for the everyman – an apt farewell from one of literature’s true originals.