The Delivery Man

by Joe McGinniss Jr.

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802170420
• ISBN13: 9780802170422
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Life lesson: you might as well double cross your own posse before they double cross you

Joe McGinnis Jr.'s debut novel follows a trio of childhood friends living fast in metropolitan Las Vegas. Narrator Chase is a young high school art teacher clinging to the last vestiges of respectability while a whirlwind of easy money and fast living lures him from the sidelines. Not surprisingly, in the opening chapters of the novel, Chase loses his day job after a fight with a student. He drifts aimlessly, refusing to officially commit to working for his pals Bailey and Michelle in their hotel suite prostitution operation. Nevertheless, he quickly falls into a role as a delivery man, ferrying around high school drop-out call girls in low-slung skinny jeans. The world created by McGinnis is full of bright lights, easy money, and the temptation of double crossing your posse before they double cross you. The money available in internet escort prostitution is an irresistible temptation to the young girls in Chase's circle. The young adults in The Delivery Man are an exaggeration of a modern celebrity-obsessed MySpace-centric generation. Suburban kids might not form internet prostitution rings, but they share the same aspirations for a life of luxury and leisure. This is a book about fallen angels and the pull between childhood habits and the potential for a new life. Chase is frustratingly distant as a narrator, which is representative of his own emotional reservations in life. The story is told as a montage of scenes interspersed with flashbacks to an adolescent tragedy. Author Joe McGinnis Jr. has crafted an unflinchingly gritty tale that captures a slice of modern drug-fueled youth culture.

Haunting novel that will ring in your thoughts

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 won

A compelling read

From the beginning this book grips you as you enter a world that is difficult to understand, but you cannot ignore. As Chase delves deeper into sex, drugs, easy money, he gives up all that is worthwhile, including his achieving girlfriend Julia, and his ambitions as an artist. Though there are no winners, this is a satisfying read, as it shows that bad choices in life lead to tragic consequences. Once I started I could not stop until the end.

An engaging read

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book--with "The Delivery Man" McGinniss's intention is to shock, and he does that very well, the novel is chock full of sex, drugs and a seeming race to the bottom in present day Las Vegas. But McGinniss stays away from the traditional redemptive story structure. You won't find any of his characters riding off into the sunset or checking in to the proverbial rehab. Instead, with a steady hand and sharp prose that dances off the page ("Don't hate me cause you ain't me, BI@#H! emphatically stated by the hilariously vacant Rachel on her MySpace page), McGinniss's dystopian world is packed with TRL watching, cell phone toting teens and twenty somethings who, as the menacing character Bailey says, "are simply not paying attention." Well, none of these characters are paying attention, except Chase. But Chase is flawed by the damage done by history, by his absent father, and by the effects of growing up in the overly adult Las Vegas. McGinniss then uses this back story to examine the effects and the permutations of this damage. There is a strong tradition of writers who deliver sharp social satire through unflinching constructions of their respective worlds. Thompson and Bukowski in the 70's and 80's (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Post Office and others), Price (The Wanderers) and most famously, Easton Ellis in the 80's and 90's (Less Than Zero, American Psycho). With The Delivery Man, McGinniss offers a work that holds it own among the works of these brilliant writers- and that is quite an accomplishment. So either you'll like this style - the unflinching view of humanity - or you won't. I suspect many people will have strong reactions to this novel - either loving it or being truly put off. I loved this book. It is a powerful, punch in the gut read and I'm glad for it. Bravo McGinniss - welcome to my bookshelf.

Review of The Delivery Man

The Delivery Man, a novel by Joe McGiniss, Jr., is an unflinching, hardcore page-turner, about a twenty-something named Chase, who for a host of reasons, namely his own low self-image, finds himself sabotaging a promising career as an artist, and his relationship with his college sweetheart. Instead, Chase has chosen to align himself with some very questionable characters, as a driver/handler of young women in a call-girl ring. The backdrop - the superficial glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, plays a major role in the novel , readily lending itself to the drugs, sex, violence, greed, deceit, and hopelessness that are so pervasive in these characters' lives. The reader of this novel will actively want to step in, and yank Chase from the slow freefall he is in until realizing that he has willingly trapped himself in this "unredemptive" underworld, and all anyone, including Chase, can do is to watch it play out. If McGinniss' intention is to make us pause, and to examine some of society's lack of personal responsibility, and apathy toward fellow human beings, then he more than accomplishes his mission with this book. He puts an exclamation point on it! An extremely compelling, masterfully-written novel. I look forward to more to come from this author.