Ride Around Shining : A Novel
Author(s): Chris Leslie-Hynan
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
A provocative debut novel about a young white chauffeur and his wealthy black employer, an NBA player—a twenty-first century inversion of what we’ve come to expect stories of race and class to look like, and a discomfiting portrait of envy and obsession.
Ride Around Shining concerns the idle preoccupations, and later machinations, of a transplanted Portlander named Jess—a nobody from nowhere with a Master’s degree and a gig delivering takeout. He parlays the latter, along with a few lies, into a job as a chauffeur for an up-and-coming Trail Blazer named Calyph West and his young wife, Antonia.
Calyph is black and Antonia is white and Jess becomes fascinated, innocuously at first, by all they are that he is not. In striving to make himself indispensable to them, he causes Calyph to have a season-ending knee injury, then brings about the couple’s estrangement, before positioning himself at last as their perverse savior.
In the tradition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Great Gatsby, and Harold Pinter’s The Servant—not to mention a certain Shakespeare play about a creepy white dude obsessed with a black dude—Ride Around Shining tries to say the unsayable about white fixation on black culture, particularly black athletic culture, something so common in everyday life it has gone all but unaddressed.
Review(s):
“Ride Around Shining lays claim to being an interesting novel on its own terms, offering some fresh takes on those big American topics of race, class, manhood and meritocracy…a rousing affirmation of American possibility.”
“Many a white guy has felt that the answers to his lameass and goofy existence might be found in making his life ‘blacker.’ Chris Leslie-Hynan’s brilliant debut is the story of one such paleface on the loose.”
“Ride Around Shining is a West Coast, twenty-first-century Gatsby, warped through the lenses of race and class, and similarly obsessed with those very American anxieties of money, ambition and authenticity. This is the best and one of the bravest novels I’ve read in years.”
“R.A.S. is brilliant. Sure, it’s about ballers and their chauffeurs, and fame and wealth and celebrity and race. But its subversive soul is interested only in one thing: the hunger, both yours and mine, to swallow the world whole. It feels like an instant classic.”
“Ride Around Shining is a searing debut—simultaneously poignant and provocative, tender and deeply unnerving. With mordant wit and exquisite sensitivity, Chris Leslie-Hynan illuminates the overlapping fault lines of race and class, aspiration and invention, borrowed nostalgia and dubious desire.”
“It’s hard to believe Ride Around Shining exists…it’s a provocative, bracing, and totally singular look at how white entitlement can fester in the face of black accomplishment.”
“A smart, sad, funny, beautifully voiced, and precisely detailed investigation of the particularly American collision of race, sex, money, and vicariousness.”
ISBN: 9780062285089