Letter marked personal - Jp Donleavy

`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.

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.