Ride Around Shining

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 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 that 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 Patricia Highsmiths The Talented Mr. Ripley and Harold Pinters The Servantnot to mention a certain Shakespeare play about a creepy white dude obsessed with a black dudeRide 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.