Ride Around Shining

by Chris Leslie-Hynan

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.

Genres: Fiction, Sports

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 5, 2014

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The problem with writing a novel from the PoV of a slacker is that it begins to resemble a conversation with a slacker: Not going anywhere fast, and wherever it is you thought you were going, you're going to end up there several times because focus isn't a slacker's strong point. The clearest image I retain of the read is of Portland, Oregon. The author is at his most lyrical, and most evocative, when Portland is the object he's observing.

The publisher's comparisons are vastly overstated as comparables. This isn't in the same league as those titles. There's no subtle (or unsubtle) kink in this story...Jess is tediously heterosexual and ineffectually infatuated with Antonia (the question I had was, "why ever are these men interested in her?!" *yawn*). I've always thought that Iago was into Othello; Tom Ripley's sexuality is "whatever gets me what I want; and Pinter's adaptation of Robin Maugham's novella is about using sex, not hopelessly bungling around with it. It's not bad, and it's a perfect story to film, but honestly finishing it felt good...because it was over.

[Terri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review also found at http://kristineandterri.blogspot.ca/2...

I received an advanced copy of this novel from the publisher Harper via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The expected publication date is August 5, 2014.

I enjoy receiving ARC's as it is an opportunity to read stories by authors that are unknown to me as well as the opportunity to discover a story that may not have crossed my path otherwise. In most cases this pays off however unfortunately it was not the case with this story.

I just didn't get it. The synopsis describes the story-line as the white fixation on black culture however I just really didn't see that. What I saw was the character of Jess who really had no redeeming qualities and seemed fixated on destroying and meddling in the lives of the people who had more than him. There was a twisted sense of entitlement and greed that I never really understood where his motivation came from.

There were quite a few characters in the story of which none drew me in. I found the story lingered at points that seemed irrelevant or surplus and there was no real flow to it.

If I had to try to summarize the story I would say it was one of greed however I am not really sure that was the point of the whole thing. For such a short book I really had to work at it to get through it and it took me much longer than it should have.

While this was not for me I think this is one of those reads where people need to decide on their own. Perhaps someone else can see the brilliance behind the plot that I failed to discover.

[David Shafer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only me-specific caveat to this review would have to be that I live in Portland Oregon, and therefore was especially taken with the author's evocation of this city, perhaps more so than a non-native would be. (And I mean not just the neighborhoods and locations, but also the traffic patterns and weather patterns and even the way the author recalls a certain sleaze and grime to pre-hipster PDX.) But I've read plenty of books set in cities I have never been to, and I have enjoyed their careful, insiderish description of place; you don't need to be from Portland to get this book. And you should get it and read it. I think so anyway. Thus the five stars.

The central conceit (I think/hope I'm using the word correctly) is that there's this guy, Jess, the white chauffeur to a (fictional) black rookie Portland Trailblazer named Calyph West. Though recently and expensively acquired by the team, Calyph injures his knee, and so must rattle around up there in his Dunthorpe mansion all season, hobnobbing with ballers and generally keeping his life together, a life which is at once princely (because he is blessed with this strangely valuable prowess on the court) and yet also stressful (because his peak-athlete status – and the financial ease that flows therefrom – is actually very tenuous).

Narrator Jess is definitely malevolent, but he's not evil or dastardly or anything like that. He's motivated by strange and complex drives that have to do with race and class and his own insecurity. What Jess does is meddle in his employer's career and marriage and home.

The story is unexpected, unexampled and totally worth reading and keeping on your shelf.

[Angie Fehl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Got pulled in by the synopsis before seeing that the author is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I've yet to find one writer that's come out of that program that I like. I find with this book that yet again -- as in with most IWW writers I've tried -- the writing isn't necessarily terribly, it just does absolutely nothing for me. I was hoping this would have a taut, thriller-ish feel to it, but no such luck for me.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure; I asked Chris for a copy of this book and in typical, self effacing form he told me it was written "before I knew how to end a novel." I would and wouldn't agree with that assessment of Ride Around Shining, a shockingly original novel about race, self, fame, capitalism and basketball; a young white man who goes to work as the chauffeur for a Black basketball player for the Portland Trailblazers and a complicated relationship ensues that isn't merely transactional. Or it is, but the measures and balances are hard to put in terms of dollars and cents. It subverts a lot of expectations in narrative moments that seem poised to make promises of cliché, only to abruptly veer into weirder, unexpected emotional terrain. As far as the ending; well, as we enter the final act there are a number of places that maybe it *could* end, so when it keeps going and the stakes seem to rapidly rise and fall it is a bit of whiplash, but when it finally settles on a stopping point, it is satisfying and unexpected.

I listened to Madlib's Sound Ancestors and then just had to throw on GY!BE's Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (my real heads here know why...)

[alice alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex and intricate work. 5 stars for the character-work of the narrator, Jesse, and the honesty and humility the author had to render his whiteness. 3 stars for the fact that the diction/style of the book didn’t seem to match the the main characters’ trajectories. And a whole bag of mixed feelings around the choices of Calyph and Antonia to keep the narrator in their lives so long. I am deeply interested and disgusted in the societal power dynamic that kept Jesse stuck to them, but I also wonder if it was realistic that they wouldn’t act more volatile against him sooner. Either way, there’s great character work here and I think the book is well worth a read as a place to think deeply about white eyes on black culture and all the problems that causes, especially when white voices are privileged above others.

[Jeff Wait · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. It started by setting up a fictional world where Greg Oden never gets hurt, and the Blazers are good enough to make the Finals. Then it prattles on about a white guy who lies to become a chauffeur for one of the Black players, setting off a series of events that were, at best, mildly entertaining. Each page felt like an opportunity to give us something cool -- and sometimes it gave us something really cool like LaMarcus Aldridge grilling -- but it mostly felt like fanfic posing as something profound. I could see what this book was trying to accomplish -- commentary on race, class and being so horny you don't know what to do -- but it landed hard on the latter and felt like a farce to the first two.

[Victor Luo]

I’m sure I’m not alone in declaring that my bookishness feels completely incompatible with sports. When friends squabble about the latest NBA gossip, I’m usually off sitting on the sidelines, wishing I had a book with me.

That is not to say I’m entirely dismissive of athletic endeavors in the first place; it’s a world that seems so foreign and yet, with some thinking, is fraught with all the same insecurities that writer-nerds like me have. Am I strong enough to make it? Do people support me? It’s easy to forget that professional athletes are human beings in precarious social positions despite being made out to be glamorously rich gods in the media.

At the heart of Ride Around Shining is this human/god dichotomy between basketball fans and professional NBA players. The novel follows Jess, an all-around average yet educated white guy, who becomes the chauffeur/servant to Calyph, a rising NBA player, and witnesses the gargantuan pressures athletic stardom puts on marriage, friendship, and self-image. The novel feels firmly of its time without pandering, taking a sharp critical look on the relationships we average-joes have with the stars we so admire and envy at the same time. The lives these stars live are far more complicated beneath the personas of cool that public relation firms carefully curate.

Race stands at the forefront as the novel’s most prominent theme, as Jess, the narrator, constantly muses on the relationship of his incidental mediocrity and whiteness in contrast to Calyph’s seemingly dazzling athlete-as-god status and blackness. I was a bit wary picking up the book, as it’s quite a tall order for a white author to properly and respectfully portray blackness (I shuddered thinking of the many things that could go wrong in trying to uphold this tense racial balance). Reading the novel in its entirety as a person of color, I applauded Leslie-Hynan’s careful yet free style examining the tensions of white-black relationships by expertly portraying the troubled jealousy in Jess’s voice as he admires yet loathes the kind of status Calyph enjoys. I can respect a white dude who puts in the effort to write in a way that attempts understand race rather than explain it from a position of privilege.

Promotions of the novel compare it to both Othello and The Great Gatsby, and after reading the novel, these parallels feel somewhat fair. I tend to despise promotions that compare new novels to the classics because they seem like such heavy-handed ploys to reassure readers that the tale they’re being sold is familiar and palatable. In the case of Ride Around Shining, I couldn’t help but think of Jess as both Iago and Nick Carraway. Like Iago, Jess’ jealously of Calyph pushes him to wish the worst for Calyph at times, and like Nick, he romanticizes Calyph’s determination to rise above the injury he suffers early in the novel that threatens his career. Jess is the kind of protagonist with the best sense of complicated: one part noble, one part despicable, and perfectly ripe for hating or loving, reader’s choice.

The novel ends with a wonderful image that ruminates on the uneasy question of the possibilities of a relationship between average-joe Jess and athlete-god Calyph. The average-joes cannot help but become jealous and admiring fans of the athlete-gods, while the athlete-gods do not want to disappoint the average-joes that have given them their careers. The question of the white-black relationship is left up to the reader’s imagination, challenging us to consider how divides are created everywhere, ones that transcend the same old rich-white/poor-black binary that defines a large bulk American history, and to ask ourselves how some gaps can be bridged and how some can never be.

My Rating: A Cup of Black Coffee with a Side of Cream

As a novel about the black-white binary of race relations, Ride Around Shining presents two stories, one of blackness and one of whiteness, side-by-side, like a cup of coffee with cream (forgive the cliché of using food analogies for race). The novel doesn’t tell you to add cream to your coffee, and thusly presents a sort of red-pill/blue-pill conundrum. Do you drink your coffee purely black, or do you mix it up with some cream? Is the purpose of coffee to drink it smooth with cream and sugar, or to appreciate its purity, to drink it black? The question is for the reader, and if you like having that choice as a reader, this novel’s for you.

Read more of my reviews here: www.thenewbiereview.com

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

First book finished in 2015! It took me about a month, though. It was not captivating if I could tolerate long set-asides. The pauses usually followed some event that made me uneasy, like Jess's making a move on his employer's wife.

Does the reader have to like at least some character in it to really love a book? I do. The most likeable character in this book is Calyph, who could be seen be as the protagonist, though Jess, the narrator, gets so much more ink he really has to be. By the end of the book, we see Calyph as noble though at the beginning he has only the jejune arrogance of the multimilliondollar superathlete. Jess is hard to read; he is not Iago to Calyph's Othello, not all "motiveless malignity” (Coleridge's phrase, I learned). He is capable of kindness, and graduate-degree smart. He does not trust himself, nor does the reader trust him.

Jess, a misfit everywhere, has doubled down on that that by upending race-class conventions in America and working as chauffeur for a pro basketball rookie. His employer’s season is ended, and career jeopardized, when his leg is injured by a huge ice sculpture that Jess has put into motion without touching it himself. It’s a half-conscious one-second action, not preplanned. In that way, it reminds me of the bough-jouncing episode in A Separate PeaceA Separate Peace. In Ride Around, however, there is a proximate cause. Jess’s employer had shot him with a flare gun moments before, belittling him.

The author is skilled indeed, and venturesome. He wades into dangerous territory of race and culture. I suspect the black basketball players in the book besides Calyph are caricatures; we know so little about the real lives of pro athletes, which reach the media mostly when something goes horribly wrong. If Calyph weren’t a mensch by the end, this would be a weak book despite the author’s writing skills. Calyph, despite his flaws, kept me with the book; it wasn’t the seaside revels or the ill-starred seductions.

3.5 stars rounded up to four.

[Catherine (The Gilmore Guide to Books) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jess is a young man living in Michigan, getting his second college degree and writing music reviews, when an old friend from Portland lets him know that an up-and-coming pro basketball player named Calyph needs a chauffeur. Despite having no real experience he takes the job when it’s offered. Chris Leslie-Hynan’s new novel Ride Around Shining begins with Jess being summoned to a party at his new boss’s house to pick up his wife. While there he brushes into an ice sculpture that crashes on Calyph’s leg. He walks away before anyone notices and takes the wife where she wants to go, which happens to be a small house she’s buying to move into and leave her husband. Jess takes a flyer and leaves it inside another book Calyph has asked him to look at.

Jess is a slippery character, an odd concoction of obsessive fan, compulsive liar and possibly, a man in love, but, with who? He appears to be one of those people who creates drama in a person’s life in the hopes of swooping in and fixing things. Unfortunately, he only appears to be good at the breaking part and wreaks havoc on Calyph’s life by causing a season-ending injury and his wife’s leaving him. It takes an unfortunate misreading of a social situation to bring Jess’ nearness to the high life to a speedy conclusion.

Much of Ride Around Shining is spent amongst the Portland Trail Blazers in their off-season, meaning Leslie-Hynan writes of parties and life at a level most of us will never even glimpse. There are palatial houses, parties of Hefneresque proportions, and special favors granted to all the athletes by everyone they come in contact with. As Jess insinuates himself into Calyph’s life as more than just a chauffeur it is Leslie-Hynan’s prose mimicing the patois of urban mega-star athletes that gives the novel the feel of riding in an Escalade, through the night, waiting for whatever might happen.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

First movement is really ace; the swap of wrongings between Calyph (the NBA player) and Jess (Iago) functions as symbolism but also goes down easy as action. Things gear up as a strange/fraught friend-zoning between Jess and Antonia (Calyph's white wife) develops. Then things begin to sag. The voice of Jess as narrator is intentionally stoned and opaque, which can be great -- generates nearly all of the novel's really crackling lines/thoughts. But for the majority of the time, Jess operates at such a weird remove not just from the plot but seemingly from himself that it is literally not possible to understand what he's talking about; like he's referring to thoughts of his own that we can't see. Things rally intermittently but keep snapping back to this impenetrable conversation Jess is having with himself. Even his stylized, symbolic conversations with external characters are spoken in the gnomic language of his brain. The end is stronger, and does involve a (no lie) car chase between a bio-diesel Maybach driven by an Adam Morrison manque and a loaner Mazda driven by Jess (it works up to a nicely turned Taxi Driver endgame).

I was tempted to award a punishing two stars just because of how frustrating the sections where the meaning/intent goes AWOL, but it's short and brave and impressive for a first novel. Didn't quite get the Gatsby comparisons reached for, but Othello x Remains of the Day x Taxi Driver. You can't be inspired by those things and have as much writing talent as dude does and not come up with something interesting, even if it's flawed.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most well-written debut novels you'll ever come across. It's true that this book evokes Gatsby, and Othello, and probably some other famous stuff I haven't read (and actually, I haven't read Othello--I need to get on that), but it also stands alone as a compelling meditation on race and class and the American sports entertainment complex. The strange motivations of our narrator, Jess, are not easily unpacked, nor are the motivations of the African-American NBA players who grudgingly accept him into their world. Ride Around Shining is a highly readable, highly thought-provoking work. You really should've bought your copy by now, but it's not too late. Head to your local independent bookstore today!

[Laddie Tabor · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I thought this book was well written, it wasn't on any favorite list. The issue is not with the book, it's more about me. The background story is about a basketball player who got injured and all the things he finds himself doing. In reality, I guess it's more about the individual who was hired to drive him around. I'm sure I would have been more focused if the story had focused on an injured football player. It is a good read and while not one of my favorites I would still recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who enjoys sports stories dealing with basketball.

[Katrina Knittle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodreads win. Will read and review once received.

I was very happy when I received this book in the mail and couldn't wait to read it. It was a short read. I found myself not being able to put the book down. I really loved the characters in this book. I thought this book was interesting and at times strange. It is something different then most books I have read. I would recommend this book to people looking for something different and new.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book from the goodreads first reads program.
While being a well written and fast read, I was disenchanted by the content. The main character is a manipulative, pathological liar with a superiority complex.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

An attempt at a re-telling of Othello poorly done that somehow manages to feel more like a shoddy rendition of Gatsby. I enjoyed the caricatures of pro athletes, but even more so the strong voice of the main character.

[Jane Arnoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author has talent. He is a great writer and really makes the characters leap off the page. However, I found my attention waning many times. The story line needed tightening up. Recommended but took some patience and determination to get through.

[Carrie]

*Won in a First Reads Giveaway*

[Kaite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won a free copy from the Goodreads First Reads Giveaway Program and think that it interesting. I would recommend it to everyone.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nicely done novel. I'm giving it an extra star for taking a fresh and complex approach to the subject of modern race relations.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gave up at 50%

[Nate Hendrix · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got half way through and gave up. To slow.

[Brucie · Rating 4 out of 5]

deep and wide character study with abuse and romance and racial relations.