MENDELL STATION

A teacher of religion survives a wrenching grief by taking a job at the U.S. Postal Service during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In January 2020, Miriam Lee is preparing a lesson on God’s wrath for her private school students when she learns that Esther, her best friend since childhood—drunk and possibly suicidal—stepped off a train platform and fell two stories to her death. Unable to reconcile the belief of her fundamentalist church that Esther has probably been sent to hell with her own feelings for her friend, she reaches a state where “God and I weren’t talking anymore” and quits her job. A 33-year-old Stanford graduate, Miriam grew up with Korean immigrant parents, a now-dead father who suffered from muscular dystrophy and a mentally ill mother. “Our family lived by faith and several forms of government assistance,” she says. Inexplicably drawn to an elderly Asian mail carrier on the street, Miriam decides to apply to work for the postal service. “I want something physical. And I want to be alone.” Lonely and undone, Miriam writes letter after letter to Esther, storing them in her mailbag and writing “deceased” on the envelopes. But even as Covid makes life more difficult, the job does what she hoped it would do, anchoring her to the physical world and to the company of people who wish her well. Hwang’s debut novel depicts with care and a touch of humor the smallest details of the rickety mail delivery system and the comradeship of the fellow workers, many of them older Chinese immigrants, who help Miriam make her way within it. Gentle and meticulously observant, the novel pays tribute to the ways in which thoroughly mundane experiences can serve as a form of grace.

A quietly hopeful depiction of the bumpy process of recovery from loss.