Ride Around Shining

Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut FictionA provocative debut novel about a young white chauffeur and his wealthy black employer, an NBA playera twenty-first century inversion of what weve 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 Jessa nobody from nowhere with a Masters 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 couples estrangement, before positioning himself at last as their perverse savior.In the tradition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Great Gatsby, and Harold Pinters The Servantnot to mention a certain Shakespeare play about a creepy white dude obsessed with a black dudeRide 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.