Chase is a delivery man in Las Vegas. He delivers prostitutes. He picks them up at home or, more often, from the suite at the Palace Hotel, and drives them to other hotels or men's homes. His friends, Bailey and Michele, have rented the suite for the summer, and they pay him to drive Michele, and an increasingly large number of high school girls, to appointments. Chase knows that this is wrong, but he is hamstrung by apathy and the beautiful Michele, who he has known, and maybe loved, since they were children.
The Delivery Man, which is Joe McGinniss, Jr.'s debut, is frightfully sparse in language, and rich in character and heartbreak. It's impossible to not compare him to early Brett Easton Ellis; like the characters in Less Than Zero McGinniss's cast is selfish, self-deluded, violent, apathetic, and full to the gills with booze or drugs. His language is pared down and conveys the perfect sense of desolation that is so often heavy-handed in novels about young people frozen in life by bad choices.
Chase and his friends are all pathetic. In flash backs we learn that from an early age Michele and Chase's sister Carly were whores. Carly was Bailey's girl back then and he pimped her at a young age as he pimps the twenty-something Michele, and scores of underage girls, now. Carly is absent in the present, but functions as a full character because that absence is the cause of much unexplained tension between Chase and Bailey.
Chase is the only person who has ever managed to get out of Vegas and his sad destiny, by making a splash in the local art world, attending NYU on an art scholarship, and meeting the beautiful, intelligent Julia. But Chase could not handle New York, because he is tied to Michele and Las Vegas, so he moves back and teaches art at a local high school and pretends on the phone to Julia that he is still painting and will leave Vegas soon to be with her. He is eventually fired for beating a student, a rich thug whose girlfriend is being pimped by Bailey and Michele, and this confrontation drives the novel toward an unavoidable climax.
It is to McGinniss's credit that expected events in the novel, like the reappearance of the thug and the dissolution of his relationship with Julia, still carry a powerful sting. None of his characters are particularly likable, save Julia and Chase's friend Hunter, who manages to do what Chase can not by leaving, but they are compelling. There is a certain glee to be had when bad things happen to these stupid, selfish people. A perfect example is when Julia visits for a black MBA conference, and the vain and oblivious Michele is put in her place after trying to convince several investment bankers that she is involved in Vegas development. It is a delightfully painful scene that rings true, as we all know the joy of seeing a know-it-all and liar shut down. Of course, the biggest moment of Schadenfreude is Chase's fate. Though smart and passionate and talented, Chase deserves his comeuppance because of his inability to just fucking do something. He has options and he wastes them. For this sin, he receives a terrible punishment. True to form, the final line of the novel let's us know that, if nothing else, the bad things that happen to Chase wed him to his fate: finally, he is all in.
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