The Delivery Man: A Novel
by Joe McGinniss Jr.
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joe McGinniss Jr.Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-01-15
ISBN: 0802170420
Number of pages: 276
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Black Cat
Book Reviews of The Delivery Man: A Novel
Book Review: Haunting novel that will ring in your thoughts
Summary: 5 Stars
I just finished reading this book this morning so haven't gotten all my thoughts together but wanted to write some kind of review. This is a totally aborbing read and definitely a fast-paced story that keeps you turning the pages - hesitantly, fearfully, and sometimes with your heart racing. Some scenes have still left me shaking my head - a flashback with the main character Chase and Bailey, teenagers and a coyote, and of course the swimming pool scene - and this is really what I love to get from a book, imagery that makes you stop and think.
On the one hand this is a simple, straight-forward and easy to read novel -- I read somewhere that someone called it a beach novel. I'm not sure that anything this raw and visual and visceral could be considered beach reading but I know what they mean. You will power through this book because the author is clearly an expert storyteller.
The main character Chase is a high school art teacher in Las Vegas who gets fired and then sucked back into increasingly illicit activities with his childhood friends Michele and Bailey. He ends up as "the delivery man" of the title, driving girls, including his former high school students, to appointments and acting as a sort of bastardized protector. Did everyone growing up in Las Vegas have this experience? Do most teenage girls decide that picking up prostitution on the side is harmless? Do all twentysomethings get caught up in the trap of Las Vegas - easy money, skipping college, working somewhere around the main raison d'etre of the city? No. Certainly this isn't every Las Vegans experience I'd imagine. But focusing on it is a highly effective means of making a statement about modern day culture.
The core of this novel is about the crippling emptiness that is pervasive among a certain segment of today's american youth. And it is a subtle indictment of a society that creates girls who see trading sexual favors for breast implants as a reasonable exchange. But there are many additional complexities in this novel that have to do with violence, technology, and also with being trapped within a destructive, corrosive world. I could almost envision this type of book being written about twentysomethings who came of age during nazi Germany. You would be left with the same thesis which drives this novel: what is the best that individuals who are cultivated amidst horror are able to achieve?
Is the Hummer-driving, celebrity-obsessed, oversexualized, post 9/11 America from back in the early 2000's as bad as nazi Germany? Of course not, that's not what I'm saying. But the world created in this novel and the path that Chase, Michele, Bailey, Rush and even Rachel take seems to careen from one dangerous situation to the next and is driven in large part by the core (distorted) values and ideals that are embedded in these characters.
Chase in particular, sometimes drives you crazy, sometimes you barely like him. Just leave already! Julia is right there, he could just go, and a wonderful life would be waiting. But the nastiness and the ugliness is ingrained in him. And based on the masterful flashbacks intertwined throughout, what more could we expect from Chase? And really by the end of the story, as your heart is racing and you're saying leave! you realize his likeability or whether he leaves or not isn't really the point.
I think Bailey is the sleeper gem in this story. He's a menacing force and Chase's alter ego - sort of the worst of what Chase could or might be. I would have liked more Bailey and to better understand him. The forced wrestling on cardboard in the garage of his childhood was powerful -- I just would have liked a whole lot more time with this compelling character.
The novel is very spare and stripped down in terms of prose and language. There is an emotional distance that exists throughout in terms of the writing style. However, you still feel drawn in to the characters because The Delivery Man is written in a very jarring present tense which has the effect of underscoring a certain immediacy and intimacy with the characters.
At the end of this book I felt as though these characters lives must just keep on going. I'm left hoping for something better for them and haunted by this story. I'm really hopeful to read a sequel at some point to this great, subtle work of art.
Summary of The Delivery Man: A Novel
The Delivery Man is a thrilling and astonishing debut?a scary, fast-paced, and illuminating portrait of the MySpace generation. It is a love story set against the surreal excess of Las Vegas?and the artificial suburbs, gated communities, and freeways that surround it?where broken lives come to seek new beginnings and casinos feed the lust of tourists and residents alike. Ultrasophisticated local kids grow up fast and burn out early.
After attending college in New York, Chase returns to Vegas and is drawn into the lucrative but dangerous world of a teenage call-girl service with his childhood friend Michele, a beautiful Salvadoran immigrant with whom he shares a tragic past. Over the course of one extraordinary summer they will confront the violence and emptiness at the heart of the city and their generation.
At once stark and electrically atmospheric, horrifying and hopeful, The Delivery Man is an ambitious literary novel as well as a fast and absorbing page-turner?and a powerful indictment of a society in which personal responsibility has been abandoned, lust is increasingly mistaken for love, and innocence is an anachronism.
After attending college in New York, Chase returns to Vegas and is drawn into the lucrative but dangerous world of a teenage call-girl service with his childhood friend Michele, a beautiful Salvadoran immigrant with whom he shares a tragic past. Over the course of one extraordinary summer they will confront the violence and emptiness at the heart of the city and their generation.
At once stark and electrically atmospheric, horrifying and hopeful, The Delivery Man is an ambitious literary novel as well as a fast and absorbing page-turner?and a powerful indictment of a society in which personal responsibility has been abandoned, lust is increasingly mistaken for love, and innocence is an anachronism.
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