Delivery of the Day
The Delivery Man
Joe McGinniss Jr. © 2008
Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic New York
Review by Samuel Bartlett for Chic Today
A rainbow of perpetual neon moonlight illuminates the haunting streets of Las Vegas, an ephemeral host for the dreams of tourists, where delusions of the short road to riches mostly segue into nightmares of the antithesis, lost money, lost hope, lost purpose.
It’s on these false-promise-streets that Chase – The Delivery Man, plies his trade. Having lost his teaching position at a high school because of a fight with a student, Chase finds himself short of cash, short of luck and short of opportunity.
Enter Michelle, a teenage call girl hoping to wing her way to financial independence on the same gusts of empty promises that lure the throngs of tourists to this city of spurious hope. Chase becomes her driver, taking her from house to mansion, from bungalow to beach party where she sells her school girl looks to the underbelly of Vegas’s elite.
For good mix, throw in the obligatory pimp, the failing relationship, pregnancy, abortion, coercion, solicitation and multifaceted confrontations that spiral into twisted resolutions and you have the spinal cord of this novel dismembered from its extraneous literary flesh.
Although reminiscent of the styles of such literary mainstays as Bret Easton Ellis and Joan Didion, from the first paragraph McGinniss carves out his own tone and flow demanding at once to be acknowledged as unique. In bare-tack prose we glimpse a harrowing introspection of a world little known to most, yet somehow starkly reminiscent of contemporary society as a whole.
Greed, desire and narcissism are all catalysts that spin the wash of modern society’s day to day cycles regardless of which corner of this planet you call home.
In The Delivery Man we get an up close look at a faction of our world that darkly mirrors - fun-house style – an existence you and I have perhaps unwittingly come to accept as the norm.
Most Commented Posts
Filed under: Books
Leave a Reply