Teenage Wasteland

Early in Christopher Hebert’s novel Delivery, 17-year-old Gabe Sanders declares, “There were two things in the world I loved, baseball and Nell. One had promised to make me famous. The other had said she’d love me back.” Now, both his loves are in danger of slipping away: A mysterious foot injury cost him most of the spring baseball season, and his girlfriend has been spending a suspicious amount of time with her ex-boyfriend. It’s June 30, 1993, and Gabe’s future hangs in the balance.

Hebert’s imminently readable novel follows its hero for 15 hours as he delivers pizza in his hand-me-down 1982 Plymouth TC3 (dubbed the Bobcat) and reckons past missteps. Gabe’s injury, a stress fracture that may not be healed, serves as a metaphor for his general malaise — an existential crisis for the hormonal set. No outward sign corresponds to his inward pain, yet with every step he fears a recurrence of the feeling that he’d stepped on a “rusted nail.” He worries he’ll never live up to the hype. “What if I was nothing now?” Gabe thinks. “What if the only thing I’d ever been good at was something that was now entirely in the past?”

Stripped of his athletic fame, Gabe seems a pathetic figure. A sub-mediocre student raised by an oddball single mother, without baseball Gabe might be trapped in his unnamed upstate New York town with no prospects beyond pizza delivery. But, as Hebert makes clear, Gabe’s physical prowess has been an essential part of his identity since grade school. “Back then I was the skinny kid single-handedly wiping out entire dodgeball teams. I wasn’t cruel about it. I just never missed,” he says.

Hebert, the director of creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and author of The Boiling Season and Angels of Detroit, portrays the pressures that a great athlete endures from well-meaning outsiders and the resentment he engenders among his less talented peers. One of his longtime teammates, Powell, complains to Gabe, “I’ve probably swung a bat ten thousand times more than you. What good has it done me?” Powell doesn’t know that years ago Gabe procured the key to their school’s batting cage and has spent countless hours perfecting his craft. “Ten thousand was nothing,” he thinks.

The novel builds toward two climactic questions: Will Gabe get off work in time to escort Nell to a party she’s co-hosting (a gesture that could resuscitate their relationship)? And will he play in the next day’s tournament, where dozens of professional scouts will be assembled to assess his potential? Gabe wavers on both, trying the patience of his friends and teammates. He ducks their inquiries by claiming he has to work, but his oldest friend JT sees through the façade. “You’re not working,” JT tells him. “You’re hiding.”

Gabe’s mother, who spent years driving him to practices and games, is incredulous at her son’s passivity. “Since you were five years old … all you talked about was wanting to be a baseball player,” she reminds him. But now he’s “giving up everything to become the pizza guy.” It doesn’t compute.

The pizza-delivery conceit provides Hebert a pretext to portray in rich detail his ‘90s setting in a blue-collar town. Gabe’s cohort doesn’t waste time scrolling through social media; they cruise around town looking for action and use pay phones to call landlines. Gabe encounters a wide array of colorful figures: a swinging foursome in a hotel, a creepy recluse in the woods, a group of ‘roided nimrods with a salvage yard on their property. Gabe sees “five different chassis scattered across the lawn: three cars, one school bus, and part of a semi. All of it looked as if it lay where it had fallen. It was the Gettysburg of automobiles.”

The scenes move quickly, but our attention remains riveted on Gabe’s dilemmas and his moral growth. He delivers pizza to a house that was the site of a party two years earlier where he committed an act of unprovoked violence that baffles even him, though it appears to have originated in class bitterness. While he ponders ways to atone for that misdeed, he doesn’t hear the urgency in the CB voice of his pizza partner, Lena, who continually impresses on him that she must get off work by 11:30 for personal reasons. Readers root for Gabe to redeem his past transgressions, but not at the cost of causing further harm.

In Gabe Sanders, Hebert has produced an original version of a familiar type, the local sports hero who bears the burden of communal expectations. Like Randall “Pink” Floyd in Dazed & Confused, Gabe finds himself scrutinized at every turn. In the end, as Gabe discovers, the best that one can do is simply stand in the batter’s box and take a swing at whatever life throws at you.