The Delivery Man (novel) - Major Themes

Major Themes

The novel projects a dark perspective on the culture of Las Vegas, and also on the values inherent in the so-called 'MySpace Generation.' McGinniss based many of the anecdotes in the story on actual interviews he conducted with youth living in Las Vegas.

In a tip of the hat to Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero”, Joe McGinniss, Jr. in his debut effort “The Delivery Man”, starts off the novel with these three words: Find Yourself Here. A literary echo of the signifier from “Less Than Zero”: Disappear Here. It sets the stage for parallels between the moral nihilism of 1980s Los Angeles youth culture and the spiritual hollowness to be found among denizens of present-day Las Vegas. The New York Times Sunday Book Review highlights this theme:

"Like its closest spiritual forebear, Bret Easton Ellis’s encyclopedically inertial Less Than Zero (1985), The Delivery Man offers unflinching glimpses at mores in free fall, shock treatment in service to a woozy morality tale. “Disappear Here”, runs Clay’s mantra in Less Than Zero, suggested by the enigmatic words on a Los Angeles billboard, “probably an ad for some resort”; Chase fixates on “Find Yourself Here”, the motto for the housing development where Michele hopes to land her dream home. (In a sort of diffused paternal imprimatur, Ellis, whose career was kick-started by McGinniss’s father, Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision, reportedly was an early champion of The Delivery Man.)

For Clay and Chase (Vegasland turns out to be another surname-free zone), that stark “Here” resonates with their present-tense hells, where surface hedonism encrusts hearts filled with fear. Frequent italicized interludes stud both novels, flashing back to moments when another scrap of innocence was lost — a technique, for this strain of story, that might have its model in the handful of unexpected first-person chapters that crop up toward the end of Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays”.

The Delivery Man begins at the end, with a recuperating Chase held together by medical metal and owing over a hundred grand to the hospital. The rest of the novel (we jump back a month, though the seamless present-tense narration obscures the segue) explains how he got that way. At the end of Ellis’s debut, Clay escapes — he’s still a college student, after all, and as winter break ends, he’ll head back East. In McGinniss’s terse and memorable final sentence, Chase utters two words, and the cycle of violence powers up again, some teeth missing but with dread to burn, the snake fitting its mouth around its tail and biting hard."