http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/lif ... 60549.html
Book reviews
Feb. 22, 2008
NEW IN FICTION AND NONFICTION
By ROBERT CREMINS
Houston Chronicle
(extract)
Another tale of the Nevada desert is Joe McGinniss Jr.'s impressive debut novel, The Delivery Man. This desert isn't the one that surrounds Las Vegas but the moral desert that McGinniss' characters inhabit. In some ways, the novel is reminiscent of Brett Easton Ellis' '80s zeitgeist story Less Than Zero. Both are set in Western cities, both have titles taken from Elvis Costello songs, both feature long italicized flashbacks. But McGinniss' psychologically numb 20-somethings make Ellis' party-animal teenagers look like slightly slack boy scouts and girl guides.
The delivery man of the title is Chase, and his cargo is human. Facing a kind of "quarter-life crisis," he spends his summer ferrying his ex-girlfriend Michele and a roster of underage girls, all prostituting themselves, around Vegas to appointments. Chase has a past with a doomed sister he can't escape and a future with an MBA fiancee in California he can't grasp. He has been fired from his art-teaching gig at a prisonlike high school for fighting with a sinister student, who becomes Chase's shadow in more ways than one.
What is most striking about this novel is McGinniss' sense of place. He captures the bright bleakness of the Las Vegas beyond the Strip — the Las Vegas people actually have to live in — with an unpitying eye, a Las Vegas most of the characters loathe but seem incapable of leaving, like chips that can't be cashed in. What happens here stays here, even when Chase and his gang don't want it to. It's a place where the future, like the future suburbs of the city itself, is "just long stretches of desert waiting to be filled."
With its steady style and honed plot, The Delivery Man is a solid novel about shaky people, a better novel than its characters deserve.
Robert Cremins is a Houston novelist and regular contributor to the books pages.
Amazon U.S.
http://tinyurl.com/yob8rw