The Delicate Art of Death: A Review

Carolee Schneeman, “Eye Body #11”

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t qualify this essay with an apology. Rocker, novelist, and Brownsville denizen Ryan McGinnis released his third novel The Delicate Art of Death about 9 weeks–March 1st to be precise–and its popularity has since rocketed the first novel of his Xavier Greene series (Tears of the Dragon) into the top selling spot, I’m told, for five different categories on Amazon’s best seller lists! It’s a killer turn of events for a writer working so hard at his craft to finally see some financial return on time investment and a growing readership, as well as the dozens of reviews the new novel has received in writing and video format. So, with the semester’s grading behind me, I thought it about damn time I offer my thoughts on this newest installment of McGinnis’s work, surely his finest and most tightly scripted and executed novel to date.

The newest volume of the Xavier Greene series is an engrossing vignette in the life of Stacy Martinez, set in the wake of events from the previous novels. As Stacy returns back home and tries to re-integrate, to some degree, back into everyday life and to re-establish a rapport with her friends and family, an odd series of murders, a black car whose tail she can’t seem to shake, and an unnerving sense that things are awry increasingly awake her to the reality of her situation: that her experiences of political cabals and power’s underground operations have changed her, marked her, and made her unfit for civilian life. After Stacy’s sister’s friend Jenn dies under mysterious circumstances, Stacy begins to notice a black sedan all over town and another outsider, a woman named Natalie, who keeps appearing everywhere that Stacy does. She begins to suspect that the murders are connected, wondering naturally whether they have something to do with the downfall of Axion or the Citadel’s restructuring post-Osiris Initiative.

Everything seems to point, at least at first, toward a paranoid reading of more governmental rackets and international cabals. However, the twist comes out of left field and makes for a compelling and unexpected read reminding us that assassins and government agents are not the only arbiters of death, not the art of death’s sole practitioners.

I originally read this novel alongside other paranoid political thrillers like Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander and Cormac McCarthy’s newest novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. While McGinnis’s work is more standard political action thriller fare that has less to say about ecology and ontology, it is nonetheless a production that mirrors concerns of major authors in our contemporary moment: principally in how the pursuit of truth queers our own positionality in regards to world. Like Jane Doe and Alicia Western in the aforementioned works, respectively, Stacy Martinez’s pursuit of the truth paints a target on her back and attunes her to the traces of violence and disorder that abound, even in a rural Kansas town like her sister’s.

While Stacy’s methods of evading the cabal whose money she has stolen mirror those of Llewelyn Moss in McCarthy’s earlier crime thriller cum border novel No Country for Old Men (Both are compromised by stealing from organizations more powerful than themselves, and both notably hide their duffel bags of cash in air vents), I detect shades of John Fowles’s The Collector, as well as a feminist undercurrent whereby the damsel in distress is replaced with powerful female figures who resist male attempts at capture or control.

A novelist’s first work often tends to be semi-autobiographical to some degree, and for male novelists this registers in coming of age stories where the protagonist undergoes a demystifiying operation or an existential quest to better comprehend their relation to the world and to their ideal and actual selves. For McGinnis, his outsider assassin Xavier is instead an older character who has already undergone these kinds of narrative shifts and is instead learning to reckon with his past. Stacy Martinez, too, is haunted by the loss of an old partner and suffering from the effects of PTSD. That McGinnis can write compelling, realistic characters like this is a testament to the maturation of his work. And if I’m really honest, the occasional wordiness or typos of that first novel are rapidly disappearing as well (as he’s transitioned to self-editing: a surprisingly great improvement). For a independent author without the institutional structure of editors and copy editors, this is no minor feat.

I hear also that his fourth novel is in the works and developing quite rapidly, so if you’ve enjoyed the Xavier Greene works so far, you can expect more very soon. I know I’m champing at the bit to find out how some of the plot lines McGinnis has laid down will resolve.

I’d like to end on a note on the photo I’ve chosen to place at the beginning of this short review essay: Caroline Schneeman’s “Eye Body #11.” Rather than re-purposing the female body as a destructive canvas ala our male Dada artists, McGinnis has headed off what amounts to a fait accompli in the works of many male writers. Hell, even McCarthy’s serial killer novel Child of God trades in female objectification and mutilation to attain its narrative kicks or sense of transgression. Furthermore, whereas Stacy has hitherto been pitted against the occasional female mastermind or feminine force of evil–even this newest novel sets up that possibility–and has typically been allied to male protagonists, The Delicate Art of Death‘s denoument charts new territory for McGinnis in the development of a homosocial bond that is enticing narratively just as it is progressive in that political domain we call the interpersonal.

Schneeman once advised that we “Be stubborn and persist, and trust yourself on what you love. You have to trust what you love.” As long as us readers continue to state our support and McGinnis continues to trust the development of his craft, I expect we’ll continue to be privy to the unfolding of his talent for years to come.