NY Books: Syracuse-native author and professor explores themes of toxic masculinity, societal expectations and self-worth in his main character’s Odyssey-inspired journey.

(Above: Christopher Hebert)

Gabe Sanders is a high school phenom. He dates the It Girl, he rules the social scene and he’s on the verge of being drafted by a major league baseball team. Yet, a phantom foot injury and a pizza delivery job reveal that young Gabe is scared and filled with self-doubt, leading him to question his relationship and status, and maybe even turn his back on baseball and his exceptional talent. 

Over a single hot, sweaty shift for Apollo Pizza, Syracuse native Christopher Hebert weaves a powerful and affecting tale of bravado, masculinity and expectations that might just be unattainable in his new novel, Delivery. 

Hebert is the author of the novels The Boiling Season and Angels of Detroit. He is a professor at the University of Tennessee and is co-editor (with Martin Griffin) of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience.
For this month’s local author spotlight, we talked to Chris Hebert about writing and his new novel, Delivery, which will be available May 2, 2026.

PAK — Gabe Sanders is the definition of a golden boy. He’s dating the girl. He’s physically gifted, charismatic and seems to excel with little or no effort. But, there’s a weight on him. Besides the pressure to take the next step in baseball, he feels responsible for the happiness of his friends Julie, Powell and JT. Is that golden boy hubris or genuine empathy?

CH — That’s a good question. Like a lot of things that happen in writing a novel, this aspect of his personality emerged pretty organically. There’s a certain amount of asking a character to show you who they are, and when they do, you’re as surprised as anyone. But ultimately, I think the answer is it’s complicated. There’s definitely some stonewalling involved. Taking care of others becomes another activity he can use to distract himself from what’s going on in his own life. But it’s also one of the key discoveries of this odyssey he’s on. Because he’s been the golden boy for so long, he hasn’t had to think much about others, and this night is a crash course in discovering himself as a person in relation to those around him. I think he started this night largely unaware of how much his relationships with others matter. But by the end, he knows.

PAK — The flip side to that is that Gabe disappoints the people who really need him to step up — Lena and Nell. He might try to explain it away as mismanagement of time or that he’s a victim of circumstances beyond his control. Is this fair to him? Are we maybe expecting too much from a 17-year-old kid?

CH — Yes, maybe, although I think for most of us this pattern of failure continues well into adulthood! There’s always that challenge of being there for others when you’re barely holding it together yourself.

PAK — There are a ton of great lines in the book:
“I hadn’t made an error since I was a virgin.” (This may be a little off — thought I underlined it, but it seems I didn’t.)
“Shrugs were to Powell as snow was to Eskimos.”
“She was all forehead. You could have carved presidents into that thing.”
“Even the salesclerks slumping outside of Tom McAn were too busy contemplating suicide to care.”
In your writing practice, do you ever stockpile lines (I hear Bob Dylan now writes this way), or is it more organic? What is your practice?      

CH — Thanks! I do some stockpiling of lines, but it tends to be late-stage and very character-specific. The sharpness for me emerges not just from the voice but also from the particulars of point of view, a character’s way of seeing the world. So I really only begin gathering potential lines once I’ve settled into a character and am able to start thinking like they do, seeing things as they do. One of the rules I discovered for writing Gabe was that he’s not someone who lingers on a thought. Any and all metaphors and observations had to be concise, tossed out almost in passing. If it couldn’t be conveyed in a short burst, it wasn’t him.

In my Notes app I maintain a little file for each project I’m working on, and into that I’ll drop random observations and details, gathered while going about my day. The benefit of it taking so long to write a novel is you have lots of time to gather detritus from the world. In the [file] for this book, I had things broken down into categories, reflecting the novel’s most frequently reoccurring needs: “misc house details” (because of all the time he spends making deliveries); “things to happen in car” (because he’s driving around so much);  “misc character details” (because he’s constantly encountering new people along the way). I still have a bunch leftover. Here’s one from the “misc character details” category that I never got around to using (maybe for good reason): “It was sad, like people showing off tricks with frisbees.”

PAK — JT could perhaps be described as more of a partner in crime than a friend to Gabe. He’s scrappy and in your face without Gabe’s moral complications. On the one hand, he’s not all that likable, but his game, both on and off the field, commands attention and deserves respect. He seems to have a clearer understanding of the big picture than Gabe regarding his delivery job, baseball and Nell. Could his sharper perspective be attributed to his relentless, get-it-done personality?

CH — I think a lot of it comes from confidence, which is something Gabe used to have and has somewhat lost. JT is partly the before picture of Gabe. Of course, having a sharp perspective isn’t the same as being correct, one of the secrets charismatic people have for getting away with so much. If you’re bold and decisive enough, people assume you must be right! But it was important to me that there be a moment when we get to see past JT’s bluster and realize he’s just a kid with vulnerabilities, too.

PAK — You do a really nice job with the baseball stuff in the book, especially breaking down JT’s Charlie Hustle game. How much competitive ball did you play? How far did you get, and were you more Powell, JT or Gabe?  

CH — I was 60% Powell, 30% JT. The 10% Gabe … was my fielding and my stress fracture. I was a junior in high school, playing varsity, when I got the injury I’ve ascribed to Gabe. For me it happened basically pre-season, and I never recovered from it. The blow to my psyche was so severe I didn’t come back my senior year, even though by then I was physically healed. Once the doubt gets planted in your brain, it’s hard to remove it. It affects everything. Even though the fracture was most devastating for my ability to hit, it ultimately torpedoed my fielding too, not for any physiological reason, but because I lost confidence that I could do anything.

PAK — Powell is one of Gabe’s best friends. He’s portrayed as a kind of sad sack with limited physical ability. His father goes all out for him, from daily batting practice to a lavish Yankee-themed birthday. He seems to revere and resent Gabe not only for his physical abilities but for the way those abilities draw people to him. Are Powell’s feelings toward Gabe rooted in something more complex than typical male rivalry? 

CH — I think for Powell, a lot of it stems from the complications of feeling like an outsider socially. As one of the few Black kids in their school, he feels really marginalized. A lot of these feelings get filtered through baseball, which is an easier thing to talk about, but I think he feels a lot of envy and resentment of Gabe’s ability to move through the world with such ease, in ways he himself doesn’t have access to.

PAK — Until recently, men, especially white men, have been the biggest players in the literary world. But increasingly, women and minority voices sit atop the bestseller lists. Legacy writers like John Grisham and James Patterson are still a force, but a quick look at the NY Times bestseller list shows that ten out of the fifteen top spots are held by women. Both of the yearly publications of the best American short fiction and essays for 2025 are dominated by women. Additionally, I came across an essay by Jacob Savage, titled “The Vanishing White Male Writer,“ detailing the near-nonexistence of white men rising in the literary landscape. As someone who teaches creative writing, have you seen this drop-off in your classes, and do you have an opinion on why white men have become so absent from the literary landscape? 

CH — Yes, in the classroom definitely. And I think that’s one of the main answers to the question. In my undergraduate workshops, there’s often maybe one cis male in the whole group. We seem to be heading in the same direction at the graduate level. Demographically, fewer men are going to college, and those who are are steering (or maybe, more accurately, getting steered) away from anything having to do with the humanities. One result of it is that most men aren’t reading anymore, certainly not literary fiction. If we’re not reading books, we don’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining that no one’s paying attention to the books we’re writing. I wrote this in part because it’s the kind of book that I wished I could have read when I was Gabe’s age, but I fear there are fewer and fewer Gabes who are reading anything at all. I may well be shouting into the wind.

PAK — Last November, journalist George Packer published his third novel, Emergency. In The Atlantic magazine, he lamented the diminished state of fiction writing: “I mean literary fiction, the kind that aspires to complex characters, subtle themes, and careful attention to prose style. Those novels are gone from the best-seller lists — it’s all sexy dragons now.” Your novel aspires to all those things: complex characters, subtle themes and careful attention to style. What made you want to explore male masculinity in a deep and complex way, at a time when there seems to be a literary blind spot for this type of novel?

CH — Well, first of all, thanks! I definitely aspire. For better or worse, I seem to be capable of writing only the kinds of books I want to read. Writing a novel is so hard, and it takes so long, and if I don’t believe in it, I just don’t see the point. In truth, I couldn’t write sexy dragons if I tried. I write toward questions I’m genuinely interested in working through. In the case of Delivery, I was interested partly in the challenge of writing something closer to myself for a change, and as I went, I saw that a lot of it was wrapped up in problems of masculinity, and I followed where those led.

I haven’t read Packer’s piece, so I can’t comment on it specifically. I do mourn the diminished appetite we have for complex characters and subtle themes, partly for self-serving reasons and partly because that’s what I long to read, but also because I can’t help observing that this loss is coinciding with a moment when, as a society, it feels like we’re losing a lot of our capacity for empathy, which is one of the things literary fiction is best at providing. So much of the rhetoric permeating our daily lives seems to be coming from people who are allergic to any kind of complexity, are incapable of imagining lives any different from their own. That’s disheartening to me as a human.

PAK — With everything else going on that day — making sure Lena gets out of work at 11:30, picking up Nell for the party — Gabe is still intent on pursuing the record for most deliveries in a shift. Is that a male thing that follows us through life? That we measure ourselves by abstract numbers. First, it’s batting average and on-base percentage, but eventually it’s the size of our pickup trucks, the square footage of our houses and our bank accounts. 

CH — Gabe knows how to compete, so that’s a safe thing to fall back on, especially compared to the more difficult and delicate work of dealing with his fears and the chasm of vulnerability that has opened up beneath him. He’s also desperate for distractions. When you don’t want to have to deal with things that you don’t know how to deal with, you’ll grasp at anything.

PAK — Gabe’s foot injury, sustained in the spring, has probably healed by the time the novel takes place mid-summer. Yet he remains reluctant to play in a pivotal game with huge implications for his future prospects. Throughout the novel, we are aware of who Gabe lets down — Lena, Nell, and teammates — but isn’t everyone pushing him to play in the game — JT, his mom and his coach — letting Gabe down? Why don’t they take his obvious mental health issues seriously? 

CH — Still to this day, my fracture flares up sometimes! But yes, point taken. And actually, it’s a good question. This is one of the things that makes talking about masculinity so messy. There’s so much toxic masculinity in the world that it can be hard to generate much sympathy for the plight of men. But there are a lot of mixed messages floating around out there. Part of the reason Gabe doesn’t know how to cope with his fears and newfound vulnerabilities is that he’s never been given the tools to do so. Likewise, he’s never had to worry about his role in relationships because he was busy being the solitary hero. The people around him, even people who love him, are operating from the assumption that because he’s always been so strong, because he’s the golden boy, that he’s invulnerable to weakness. It’s one of the curious aspects of sports that from the outside they appear to exist entirely on the physical plane, but any athlete knows how much of it is actually mental. Similar to writing. Finishing a novel has less to do with linguistic ability than with being able to endure the psychological ordeal.

PAK — Delivery will be available for purchase on May 5, 2026. Will you be in Western New York for any talks or signings? 

CH — We’re in the process of working through event plans, but I hope so.