Delivery: A Novel

The common wisdom that first novels tend to be autobiographical often holds true because new authors are usually most comfortable writing about what they know. Yet Christopher Hebert, who teaches at the University of Tennessee, waited until his third book — Delivery — to tell a story based loosely on his own teenage experiences with inexplicable alliances, unhealthy habits, and foolish quests. They’ll sound familiar to anyone who ever went to high school.

As many guys might do if given the chance, Hebert has made his alter ego, Gabe Sanders, an extraordinary baseball player of interest to pro scouts. That’s greatly exaggerated, the author admits, but he really did once deliver pizzas in an ugly yellow Plymouth Horizon TC-3, just like Gabe. (If you don’t remember the Horizon TC-3, imagine a Tesla Cybertruck left in the dryer too long.)

Delivery is set in summer 1993, just before Gabe’s senior year. The entire story, save for a few flashbacks, takes place between 3:09 p.m. one afternoon and dawn the next morning. Time-stamped chapter heads seem to strain credulity, until you recall just how much could happen in a single epic night when you were a teenager in an era before cellphones or GPS.

This particular night, Gabe’s one of only two delivery people on the job for Apollo Pizza. The other is Lena, a woman who’s a few years older and a few years wiser. She’s put a CB radio in Gabe’s car so the two of them can stay in touch as they hurry square boxes to hungry customers all over the greater Syracuse area. She often provides him with directions (in more ways than one) when he gets lost.

Although they’re competing to beat the record for the most deliveries in a single shift, she does her best to motivate him to be speedy — in part because she’s desperate (for her own reasons) to finish at a very specific time. But it’s tough because despite Gabe’s good intentions, he’s all too easily distracted.

Somehow, his detours include visits with the girlfriend he seems to be losing, as well as with teammates eager to talk him out of skipping tomorrow’s game. He also spends time with a few quirky customers; provides dating advice and a set-up for a shy friend; argues with a vegan about pepperoni; manages to put in an important appearance at a parents-are-away party; convinces a cop not to give him a ticket; and even squeezes in a trip to the gym.

It’s no wonder, he observes, that “the pizzas were getting cold. The pizzas were always getting cold.”

There are moments when a reader might think, “Get back IN THE CAR, Gabe!” (This one did.) But even if things sometimes get a little hard to believe, you’ll want to know how the story ends.

Despite Lena’s teasing that Gabe spends too much time in his car thinking about nothing — which she characterizes as “the universal condition of teenage boys” — that’s not quite true. He enjoys reciting pizza prices because they’re “like police code, meaningless unless you were in the know. $13.80 meant large, one topping, tax included.”

He also notes how really good ballplayers all “went to high schools in one of those ending-in-a states we stole from Mexico so old people wouldn’t have to be cold all winter long: Florida, Arizona, California.” And a friend’s truck model name “was one of those long strings of letters and numbers that was supposed to make you feel like you were in a serious machine capable of serious things.”

These are the sorts of shallow-end observations a young man might confidently make while quietly struggling to determine what’s truly important in life.

Reading a book written by a guy, and about a guy, felt a bit unusual for me. I realized that most of what I’ve read lately has been by women, and the trend is clear: In 2020, the majority of new books was written by women (versus 18 percent in the 1960s), and, as of 2021, books by women outsold those by men.

While it was a surprise to learn the pie is, indeed, being sliced differently these days, there’s still plenty of room on the shelf for this fun, nicely written male tale of a simpler time not all that long ago. Like a good pizza, Delivery is quite tasty without being too cheesy, and at just 216 pages, it’ll probably be consumed nearly as fast.

Randy Cepuch is a member of the Independent’s board of directors and a frequent reviewer who once owned a yellow Plymouth Horizon TC-3.