Ride around shining : a novel

Format:

Book

Title:

Ride around shining : a novel

Author:

Leslie-Hynan, Chris author

ISBN:

9780062285072

Edition:

First edition.

Publication:

New York, NY : Harper, [2014]

Physical Description:

226 pages ; 24 cm

Summary:

"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 NBA small forward, a Trail Blazer named Calyph West, and his young wife, Antonia. Calyph is black, 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 Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley 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 is a striking, propulsive debut that is by turns hilarious and discomfiting, moody and thrilling, and which asks unforgettable questions about the modern tensions of race and class in America"--Jacket flap.

Subject(s):

Chauffeurs -- Fiction.

African American basketball players -- Fiction.

Race relations -- Fiction.

Rich people -- Fiction.

Genre:

Psychological fiction.

Fiction

Psychological fiction

Romantic suspense fiction.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Monmouth Public Library	Fic Leslie-Hynan, C. 2014	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

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Summary

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.

Reviews (2)

Kirkus Review

A young mans job chauffeuring an NBA star turns out to involve carrying more baggage than he expectedracial, romantic and otherwise.Jess, the narrator of Leslie-Hynans debut, has stumbled into an inner sanctum of sports celebrity: Through some unlikely coincidences, hes become the personal driver for Calyph, a player for the Portland Trail Blazers. The bling-y external trappings of the job are shallow, if not actively problematic: In the first chapter, Jess knocks over an ice sculpture at Calyphs rented mansion that injures his bosss knee. But Jess dwells more on the internal dynamics, which offer rich territory for a novelist. Jess is a white man in a black milieu, and Leslie-Hynan has an ear for baller slang and an eye for the subtle power plays that come with a wealthy man and the servant who knows the households secrets. Further complicating matters is Calyphs white wife, Antonia, who begins a romantic push and pull with Jess. There are unmistakable echoes of Othello here, as well as The Great Gatsby, down to a climactic car wreck in the closing pages. But those familiar antecedents make this novel feel more like a thought experiment than the provocative look into a subculture that its meant to be. Jess banter with Calyph and his entourage has energy and humor, and intermittent moments capture Calyphs heavy-hangs-the-crown temperament, his recognition that hes famous and talented but not forever. Those moments of close observation never cohere, though, into a strong story that also wants to pack in plenty of romantic parrying and musings on race. Leslie-Hynans unmistakable talents as a stylist are undermined by a protagonist whos drably passive (a clumsy man of inaction) for much of the novel.To extend the basketball metaphor, Leslie-Hynan is generally strong in the paint but hasnt yet developed the stamina for four quarters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

This first novel by a Portland, OR, graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop takes its title from a rap song about driving a powerful luxury car and its epigraph from an earlier generation's memoir-style novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. As in that novel by James Weldon Johnson about deciding whether to live as black or "pass" as white, the unlikable narrator here is white, suburban, twentysomething Jess desiring acceptance in a circle of black pro athletes. Masquerading as a down-at-the-heels blue blood, Jess gets a job as chauffeur to Portland Trail Blazers player Calyph West. As each is attracted by the other's supposed culture-inner-city black vs. old-money white-a dysfunctional master/servant relationship develops. Verdict With echoes of The Great Gatsby and The Talented Mr. Ripley, this novel's possibly unreliable narrator worms his way into the household of black NBA player Calyph and his white wife, Antonia. Although highly disturbing, the disjointed narrative doesn't fully develop the racial and sexual tension or the characters enough for this book to take a place alongside those aforementioned classics.-Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.