The Delivery Man: A Novel - Softcover

Joe McGinniss Jr.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802170420 ISBN 13: 9780802170422

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Black Cat, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"At first glance, this debut novel looks like a good, short read for the next time you're waiting at the airport. It's an insider's guide to the dark underbelly of twenty-first-century Las Vegas, brimming with brand names, hard bodies, hard drugs, and heavy doses of sex and violence. If that's all you're looking for, The Delivery Man won't disappoint. . . . But once you finish it, you won't be able to get it out of your mind--McGinniss uses his fast-paced, B-movie plotline to explore how the flip side of the American dream can often be an inescapable nightmare, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald manipulated the melodrama of The Great Gatsby. In fact, The Delivery Man, like Gatsby, is the story of a lost generation. While Fitzgerald's flappers danced as fast as they could before their world collapsed in Depression and war, McGinniss's losers are stranded in an empty landscape of dead sex, coked-out emotion, and pointless danger. To his credit, McGinniss refuses to take the easy, ironic way out favored by so many contemporary writers who distance the reader from the characters. You see these doomed, wretched people for what they are, and then McGinniss allows them to break your heart. The Delivery Man is that rare first novel that could well become a classic." --Peter Bloch, Penthouse

"This debut novel from the son of the famed true-crime reporter is a searing portrait of young wastrels adrift in a vacuous Las Vegas. Chase couldn't cut it as an NYU art student and now finds himself mired in old, self-destructive patterns. Fired from his high-school teaching job following a fistfight with one of his students, he falls into a job chauffeuring a ring of teenage call girls to clients' homes. The ring is run by an old friend, an acquisitive Salvadoran immigrant who longs to buy a home in one of the ubiquitous new housing developments springing up in the desert. Although Chase is engaged to an ambitious business grad student and is himself struggling to finish a group of paintings for a gallery opening, he finds his sense of purpose draining away. Unsavory business partners and old vendettas soon come into fast and furious play. McGinniss never wavers from his ruthless portrayal of the morally bankrupt, and some readers may be put off by the unlikable characters, but this atmospheric page-turner gains increasing depth as it barrels toward a gut-wrenching conclusion." --Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

From the Back Cover:

Praise for The Delivery Man:

"A dead-of-night story surehandedly told in a pared-down, teeth-bared style reminiscent of Joan Didion--nothing stated but everything implied. This is writing not so much about the what as much as the how in the ungracious space of lives taken as they come in a nightmare Las Vegas that is nevertheless someone's home." --Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black

"A gripping literary thriller and an auspicious debut." --George Pelecanos, author of The Night Gardener and Drama City

"This is a thrilling debut--a novel about youth wasting itself knowingly against the laid-back, glossy, trademark amorality of Las Vegas, told in a voice that sounds like that of a slightly older, hipper Holden Caulfield, coming of age in a place which has no past or future--only the cool, gleaming, terrifying present. Sexy, touching, always shrewdly observed, and with a killer ending, The Delivery Man is the Less Than Zero of the early 2000s--and the first step in what I am sure will be a remarkable career." --Michael Korda, author of Ike and Charmed Lives

"Powerful and compelling, a novel of nonstop tension in a landscape so modern, so up to the minute, that you can set your watch by it. And while it reminds me of Hunter Thompson and Robert Stone, it is also a book by a young writer whose talent is at once fierce and entirely new. Fresh, haunting, the kind of book that keeps you up at night to turn the pages." --Craig Nova, author of Cruisers and The Good Son

"Traveling through a Las Vegas no tourist ever sees, The Delivery Man vibrates with heat and fear, sex and heartbreak. This is a fast and terrifying novel--definitely not a ride for the squeamish." --Jill Eisenstadt, author of From Rockaway and Kiss Out

"The Delivery Man is a brutally clear-eyed and beautifully built story that shines a light on Las Vegas' dark underbelly. In its unforgettable characters, its unflinching examination of a piece of America most of us would like to pretend does not exist, and its probing of the darkest urges of the human psyche, this novel has all the force and authority of top-shelf fiction, and marks the arrival of an important new voice on the American literary scene." --Roland Merullo, author of In Revere, in Those Days and A Little Love Story

"Poor Chase: he feels like God's Lonely Man, all longing and disillusionment, and no one disappoints him more than he disappoints himself. He's part of a longstanding American tradition of hard guys with soft centers, guys with an exquisitely calibrated sense of their own self-degradation, like one of Bret Easton Ellis's heroes refracted through Raymond Chandler. The Delivery Man is arresting on the way, in the face of our undoing, we're inadequate but still culpable, and idealistic but still paralyzed." --Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0802170420
• ISBN 13: 9780802170422
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276