Clockers: A Novel by Richard Price Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Clockers: A Novel
Book Review: Brilliant, mind blowing and extremely well researched
Summary: 5 Stars
Richard Price first came up with the idea for Clockers whilst sat in a fast food restaurant in New York, during the waning years of what later became known as The Crack Epidemic. Whilst he observed overworked teenage kids sweating behind the counter for minimum wage inside, outside street dealers - in full view of the restaurant staff - made twenty times as much selling Crack.
This posed the seemingly obvious question: What stops the guys inside the restaurant from doing what the guys outside the restaurant are doing? With that question in mind Price set out to research and, ultimately write, one of the finest examinations of 20th century crime ever written.
Set against a modern day equivalent of Hogarth's Gin Lane, rife with crime, privation, and a new form of Mother's Ruin - Crack - Clockers is the story of murder, deceit, prejudice, corruption, and, ultimately, redemption.
While there are some minor inaccuracies concerning the actual drug, it's clear the rest of the book, including the black society in which it is set, was meticulously researched, for which the author should receive recognition - after all it isn't often non-black writers document Afro-America without relying heavily on conjecture.
Slightly dated now, this is still a brilliant, edifying, and educational novel. Top marks.
Oh, and the answer to that question: What stops the guys inside the restaurant from doing what the guys outside the restaurant are doing? Those guys inside have someone's heart to break and they know it - that's why they aren't doing it.
Book Review: Evolution of an Author
Summary: 5 Stars
In a 2008 interview, Richard Price spoke of his evolution as a writer, noting that he'd learned to say more with less. That is, instead of driving home a point four times in four different ways, he'd find the single most effective way to do so, and leave it at that.
Reading CLOCKERS after Price's 2007 novel Lush Life, I can see exactly what he means. CLOCKERS is so convincing in its depiction of urban New Jersey in the 1990s, one imagines that among other things, Price went on dozens of police ride-alongs for research.
That said, after a few hundred pages and umpteen instances where Strike (one of our two protagonists) clutches his stomach, I felt the urge to shake Price's editor and say, "We get it: He has an ulcer!" This isn't to diminish the novel's power; among other things, it features a crime boss named Rodney, who may be the most fascinating literary villain I've run across since... Iago?
CLOCKERS is the rare crime novel that is more successful as literature than it is as a mystery. For a book built around the question of who murdered whom, the answer is a red herring. But as a vivid and muscular account of the big city's underbelly, this is one heck of a book.
Highly recommended.
Book Review: Exceptional
Summary: 5 Stars
Beyond brilliant, there is no American writer living or dead who has such perfect pitch, an ear for the language which is infallible. Add that to little details, like real and interesting characters and story, and you better believe Price is the best. He can make you cry.Book Review: Not a favorite
Summary: 2 Stars
I found this book to be a very difficult read and gave up about half way through. I found the characters uninteresting and the pace far to slow. Given the reviews of the book I was hopeful that it would improve with each chapter but at the half way mark I decided that I read for enjoyment and I was not enjoying this book. Thus I would not recommend this book.Book Review: Richard Price vs. Elmore Leonard
Summary: 4 Stars
When I read Richard Price I find myself mentally comparing his fiction with that of Elmore Leonard. Price works on a somewhat bigger scale and perhaps is more "serious" about his fiction; in contrast, Leonard seems to be aiming more for entertainment. Leonard certainly is more prone to structure his narrative around the joke or witticism. For edginess, Leonard relies a little more on sex and violence, Price more on drugs. Leonard's settings tend towards the glitzy, Price's more towards the squalid. But both depict the seamier sides of contemporary urban America in compelling ways and both are masters of dialogue. Last year, when I read Price's latest novel "Lush Life", I concluded that I liked it better than I liked any of Leonard's novels. So it was interesting to go back and read CLOCKERS, which many regard as Price's best work. (I had started it shortly after it was released in 1992, but due to demands of work never finished it then.)
CLOCKERS is set across the Hudson from New York City, in the fictitious city of Dempsey (seemingly a composite of Jersey City and Newark). The stories of CLOCKERS, for the most part, are the stories of drug use in and around the housing projects. Most of the dozens of characters in the novel fall into two groups: the dealers (and users) vis-a-vis the cops. The principal representatives of the two groups are the two protagonists: Strike, a 19-year-old black youth who sees drug dealing, or clocking (selling bottles of powdered coke at $10 a pop), as "his best shot at having a life, like going into the army or working for UPS"; and Rocco Klein, a 43-year-old Homicide Detective, approaching twenty years service and the temptation to embark on a new career, but at the same time hooked on the absurdities, the adrenalin rushes, and the unusual moral dilemmas of his job. The story is narrated in chapters that alternate back and forth between the perspectives of Strike and Rocco (and thus alternate between the drug dealer and the cop, black and white, nominally bad and nominally good).
There is a third main character, Strike's brother Victor, who does not belong to either group. Victor is a straight-arrow young man, who still lives with his mother in the projects together with a dull and unappreciative wife and two small children and who works two full-time jobs trying to accumulate the stake necessary to move his family out of the projects. The overarching "mystery" of the novel is whether Victor really could have been the one to gun down Darryl Adams, who sold cocaine by weight out of a fried fish restaurant named Ahab's (and is there any symbolism in that name?).
CLOCKERS is a decent read. The overall picture of North Jersey and the "cycle of s**t" is captivating, much like the series "The Wire" (which was influenced by the novel and for which Price was one of the writers). There are many memorable vignettes and characters (who are sketched with understanding and empathy rather than being cardboard stereotypes), and there is much dazzling, spot on dialogue. But there also are weaknesses. For example, the exposition often is rather conventional and is laden with extraneous detail; there is too much explicit moralizing, which occasionally is insultingly heavy-handed; and the motivations for several of the key acts or decisions of the three main characters are not fully persuasive. To an extent these weaknesses are more apparent when CLOCKERS is read after having read "Lush Life," which is a more accomplished and mature novel, with a markedly pared down narrative style and dialogue that is even more brilliantly rendered (as good as dialogue gets in contemporary American fiction).
So I return to my comparision between Price and Leonard. I still think that "Lush Life" is better than any of Leonard's novels, but the best of Leonard is better than CLOCKERS.
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