Book Review: The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss, Jr

"On bad mornings...he would call Julia in Palo Alto. He would be on Summerlin Parkway heading west past the Stratosphere toward the high school and Julia would say things to Chase that he knew weren't true anymore, but it made him feel better to hear them. Some mornings were worse than others and it really wasn't the school or the teaching gig or the desert rats that made up he student body that bothered him-it was something deeper, messier...And on the bad mornings when he called and she wasn't there-or didn't pick up-he wouldn't leave a message. He would just slide lower in the seat, driving faster, struggling to remember why he was pissing away twenty-five."

In The Delivery Man, Joe McGinniss, Jr. writes, in themes reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis, of twenty-somethings still caught up in high school dynamics, old loves and rivalries, now super-charged by big money. What started out as partying with friends and the equivalent of schoolyard games of chicken turns to big business in a city like Las Vegas with enough cash, and a steady stream of fresh recruits. The grimy, glitzy, Strip, makes a fitting backdrop for a novel that highlights internal and external contradiction.

First there is drama, and then there is a phone call to Chase. Chase tells himself that he is tired of the drama, that he is leaving. But Chase does not leave. Whatever happens in Vegas, Chase stays in Vegas. He has had opportunities to get out, move away, move on. He went to New York, to school, to paint and found Julia. But somehow he's back in the desert, a graduate of UNLV teaching high school in a building that started life as a prison. Even now, as he allows Julia to make grown-up plans for them in Northern California, Chase is building a better arsenal of excuses and lies to keep him driving his sister's Mustang around Vegas with a hooker in the front, and sometimes in the back, delivering them from suite to suite, houses in the hills, parties by the pool, and pocketing the cash. Digging his heels in, refusing to be saved, Chase is the most stubborn addict in the room, so subtle that maybe no one, certainly not Chase, knows exactly what about this place he's addicted to. Not the simple stuff, the drugs or the sex. Maybe it's just being home, the place he grew up, where his mom still lives under a flickering marquee. Maybe it's Michele, riding shotgun in one way or another for as long as he can remember. But, just like an addict, he can only stay on the wagon awhile-Chase's rehab is Julia, with her MBA and her plans for their life together in San Francisco--before he starts breaking promises, taking calls from the wrong people, letting the wrong ones go.

McGinniss was born in 1970. He lives in Washington, D.C. This little slice of Vegas is his first novel.