43 pages • 1 hour read
The Longest Ride
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Early February 2011: Ira”
At 91, dying of lung cancer, Ira Levinson by his own admission is “the last of [his] kind” (1): a Southern Jew, raised by immigrant parents with an old-school code of morality, integrity, and honesty; a small business owner who ran his family’s haberdasher shop until his retirement; a widower married for more than 50 years. Ira knows the world has changed during his lifetime.
Now, on his way to visit Black Mountain College in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains as he has done every year to celebrate his wedding anniversary (he and his wife Ruth honeymooned in the mountains), he skids on an icy stretch. His truck lands on an embankment. His head is bleeding, and he fears his arm may be broken. It is snowing. He is cold, in pain, and helpless. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he hears a familiar voice. “You must wake up, Ira” (8). It is Ruth, who died nearly 10 years earlier.
Ruth encourages Ira to remember when they first met. She was the daughter of Austrian Jewish immigrants. Her father, a respected university art history professor who left Germany to save his family from the threat of Hitler, couldn’t find a teaching job, so he became a carpenter. Ruth’s spirit tells Ira how drawn she was to the “softness in [his] eyes” (15). Even after Ira left North Carolina to study at the College of William and Mary, he could not forget Ruth.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Four Months Earlier: Sophia”
The novel flashes back four months. Sophia Danko, a senior at Wake Forest University majoring in art history, reluctantly accompanies one of her sorority sisters to a party off campus, where a bull riding championship is in town. Sophia is still recovering from her breakup with Brian, a hunky lacrosse player and serial cheater. She has begun to worry about her life after graduation. Her degree, inspired largely by a course in French Impressionism she took as a freshman, offers only limited job opportunities. The daughter of a blue-collar deli owner in Trenton, New Jersey, Sophia has never really felt at home in North Carolina. She feels out of her element at the party, staged in a barn near the rodeo site, although she notices a “solitary man in a cowboy hat” (30) standing apart in the shadows. As she leaves the party, a drunk Brian aggressively harasses her to reconsider their breakup. When he steps too close to her, however, the stranger in the cowboy hat intervenes. Brian belligerently suggests the man mind his own business, but the cowboy dispatches Brian with a single quick punch.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Luke”
Luke notices Sophia before he intervenes to rescue her from the drunk: “It was hard not to appreciate the cascade of blond hair and deep-set eyes” (43). He is not enjoying the party despite winning the bull riding competition that evening. He is aware of tremors in his hands—the result of a fall more than a year earlier when he tried to ride a massive bull with lopsided horns known on the circuit as Big Ugly Critter.
Sophia asks Luke why he rides bulls, and he is momentarily stumped for an answer. It is because of his father, who also rode the circuit. When Luke’s father died six years earlier, Luke and his mother worked to keep the ranch operating. Luke shares with Sophia stories of his life on the ranch, which, although less than an hour from the Wake Forest campus, seems like an entirely different world.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Sophia”
As she talks awkwardly with the cowboy, Sophia is drawn by his eyes, his smile, his broad shoulders, and his wiry frame. She can tell Luke also finds her attractive. Born and raised in a city, she is enthralled by Luke’s descriptions of the ranch. Impulsively, she asks him, “Tell me something you don’t usually tell people” (56). Momentarily taken aback, Luke offers to show her rather than tell her. Curious, she gets into his truck and they drive off a short distance from the barn to the pen where a massive bull with a decidedly crooked horn stands in the blue moonlight: “Though he wasn’t as large as some of the others, there was something wild and defiant in the way he stood” (59). Luke tells her this is Big Ugly Critter, a bull few riders on the circuit have ridden and confesses that the bull scares him. He adds without explanation that he has only recently returned to compete after a hiatus of nearly a year and half. When the night turns chilly, Luke drives Sophia back to the party. Before they part, however, Sophia asks to see his ranch. He agrees to give her a tour the next day.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Ira”
Night descends, and Ira feels the cold as the wind shrieks through the shattered car windows. “I am slowly being buried alive” (66), he thinks. Ruth gently suggests he remember when they first met, in 1940. He was home from college for the summer, and she approached him as he left services at the synagogue. The two took a walk together, and “She saw something special in me that made no sense to me,” Ira admits (70). Ira returned to school, but when he came home nearly a year later, Ruth was waiting for him at the train station.
In the present, Ira can feel sticky blood on his forehead, but also feels “magic in the car” (71).
The night he came back from college, they had their first kiss: “I could feel the promise in it, the promise that [she] would kiss me just like that, forever” (73).
After the bombing at Pearl Harbor that December, Ira enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He told Ruth he loved her and that he wanted to marry her. They shared their dreams: Ira running his father’s business, Ruth becoming a teacher, and the two of them buying a house and having a huge family.
In the present, in the wrecked car, Ira’s shoulders sag, suddenly weighed down by an “ancient sorrow” (78). But Ruth celebrates that memory, that promise. “We shared the longest ride together, this thing called life, and mine has been filled with joy because of you” (78). She gently tells Ira to try to get some sleep and promises she will be there when he wakes. “I am always with you, Ira” (80).
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The novel juxtaposes two relationships that seemingly have little in common in alternating chapters. This structural complexity encourages readers to find patterns that define the broader experience of love. In the first chapters, we see the meet-cute beginnings of the relationships of Ira and Ruth and Luke and Sophia. These beginnings share three elements: a sense of displacement and estrangement; the pull of the past; and a willingness to move forward in a relationship that appears to promise little chance of success.
First, none of these four principal characters feels entirely at home in their North Carolina home. Each feels alone, but yearns not to be isolated. Ira’s Jewish faith isolates him and his family while he is growing up; now, at 91, he sees himself as an inconvenience, someone invisible and irrelevant. Luke is a cowboy far from the typical Western setting. Sophia is an art major surrounded by business majors, a transplanted city girl who looks at her sorority sisters with bemusement. Ruth is an Austrian Jewish émigré, aware of her broken English and missing the grandeur and elegance of her family’s former life.
Each character is to some degree emotionally rooted in the past. Ruth’s spirit is literally a fragment of the past—a spirit Ira hallucinates as his head bleeds profusely—while the Ruth in his memories comes from a family that has had to give up its intellectual and social status to flee Nazi persecution. Ira cannot let go of the guilt he feels over his wartime illness that forever denied the woman he loved what she wanted most—children. Luke’s physical state constantly reminds him of his disastrous ride of Big Ugly Critter and the brain injury that threatens to end his career. Sophia languishes in the pain of her breakup after Brian cheated on her without remorse. The characters are traumatized by their past, but the novel argues that real love can make these burdens manageable.
Finally, each couple takes a leap of faith towards a more serious commitment, acting on instinct rather than evidence. This sets the relationships on a foundation of transparency and trust. The theme is set by the odd and abrupt question Sophia poses to the cowboy stranger who just rescued her from her belligerent ex: Tell me something you’ve never told anyone. The question is so entirely inappropriate and unexpected (even Sophia is not entirely sure why she asks it) that Luke’s willingness to answer opens a connection between them. Circumventing his usually taciturn and socially awkward nature, Luke shows Sophia the bull that nearly killed him and admits he is afraid of the animal.
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