Lush Life: A Novel by Richard Price Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel
Book Review: A strong pulse and fabulous dialogue
Summary: 5 Stars
In Price's latest Manhattan's Lower East Side is a dangerous place, steeped in history, and pulsing with life, attitude, grit and hilarity. Its people are driven by hope, despair and calamity. Gang bangers, cops, wannabes and ordinary people just trying to get by - Price arouses compassion for even the scariest, the most lost, the doomed.
The story is an ordinary one. Three youngish white guys, out late, drunk. They get mugged. One of the drunks says, " `Not tonight, my man,' " and is shot dead. Or, as a cop on the scene says, " `Suicide by mouth.' "
The reader has already met the players. Eric Cash, 35, restaurant manager at Berkmann's. Like everyone in the restaurant business it's just his day job, but after years of negligible accomplishment his "unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly by those his age or younger, without running face-first into a wall."
Eric is a reliable, loyal sort, good at reading people or, as he has come to think of himself, a "boy-faced dog."
Ike Marcus is no one's dog. The new bartender at Berkmann's, he's young, brash and confident. The third of the trio is Ike's friend Steve, a serious drunk. The three are celebrating Steve's audition call-back when the mugging happens and Ike winds up dead at the hands of a couple of black or Latino kids.
This is Eric's version, Steve having collapsed in a drunken coma on the sidewalk.
Then there's Matty, lead cop on the murder. "Matty preferred his outdoor crimes to come about in the wee hours, the eerie repose of the street allowing for a deeper dialogue with the scene; and so he now pondered the shell casing, .22 or 25, thinking, Amateurs, 4:00 a.m. the desperado hour, the shooter or shooters young, probably junkies....now they'll hole up for a little, look at each other, `Oh, man, did we just...,' shrug it off, get high, then come back out for more."
It looks like a slam dunk, but a couple steps up, clubbers, who happened to be across the street at the time. They saw no kids of any color. All they saw was Eric, with something metallic in his hand. And just like that, it looks like a different kind of a slam dunk.
And even we the reader, who have already met the two project kids - sad, lonely Tristan, stuck between his drunken, abusive, ex-stepfather and his longing for belonging, and his new mentor, Little Dap, already a veteran of the streets, even we come to half believe that Eric's jealousy of Ike's youth and vitality somehow led to the shooting.
The witnesses are so sure of themselves. They have no agenda, no connection to the crime other than what they saw. And Eric's lies begin to pile up, his trapped, floundering demeanor grates, his fear becomes contemptible.
Still, Matty's a bit uncomfortable. No gun, no evidence, no "why."
" `Nice to have a why,' Yolonda muttered. `Why'd that Salgado kid get shot last year, remember? Borrowed an iPod, gave it back without recharging it.'
`C'mon, that was in the Cahans.'
`Oh. Right. Excuse me. I forgot. This guy's white. Sorry. What was I thinking.' "
Before the day is out Eric is banged up in the Tombs.
But this is just the beginning. We haven't yet met Ike's father, shell-shocked with grief and disbelief, or Ike's beguiling, persevering stepmother, or achingly young stepsister. We haven't met Matty's alienated sons (the "Big One" and the "Other One") or Little Dap's posturing homeys. We have yet to read Tristan's labored rap lyrics, or plumb the depths of Eric's desperation.
Price ("Clockers," "Freedomland," co-writer of HBO's "The Wire") takes us inside all their heads, into their secret, sad, scary places. His dialog crackles with place and personality. He shows us how expectations shape events, and how big a part luck plays in our lives.
There's plenty of suspense but this rich narrative is more about human nature than plot. Price's empathy, eye for detail and ear for talk make this urban fiction at its finest.
Book Review: ARGUABLY PRICE'S BEST NOVEL.
Summary: 4 Stars
Book Review: An Even-Lower East Side
Summary: 2 Stars
The late William S. Burroughs pioneered the Cut-Up Method of writing in which the pages of his mid-period novels were shuffled together at random, and the result was supposed to produce a surreal or magical effect. I mention this because the pages of "Lush Life" could likewise be shuffled at random (perhaps they were) without destroying the plot. There is no plot; merely a sequence of vignettes and tableaus concerning dull characters that we don't much care about, and it all seems thrown together haphazardly. Even if it does not actually employ the Cut-Up Method, the novel certainly is unstructured.
Lacking a sequential storyline or progression in narrative is not, of course, a fatal flaw in a novel, and many great novels are simply character studies. In this case, the portrait is that of life in Lower East Side Manhattan, but it's just as much true of life in any city in the USA, and what these cities all have in common is decay and boredom. That's what this novel is -- a study in boredom; dysfunctional families, inept police bureaucracy, annoying characters, repeated situations. It's like The Bonfire of the Vanities with the juice sucked out.
This all comes as a severe disappointment, because I greatly admire Richard Price's earlier novels. (I've read Clockers: A Novel several times.) I imagine that he was too busy with his screenwriting jobs to devote much attention to this book, and most of the novel reads like he worked on it sporadically -- throwing-in anecdotes he just heard as well as gratuitous sex scenes-- and hoped that his celebrated gift for realistic dialogue would hold the whole mess together.
The trouble is, all that realistic dialogue begins to pall, and after a few chapters truncated sentences and people saying What? no longer seems so clever. There are a few brilliant lines scattered throughout the early chapters, but soon, the long slog through the book no longer seems worth it.
Much is made in the earlier chapters of having the suspect (Eric) submit to a paraffin test for gunshot residue. Unfortunately, that test has long been obsolete, and most police departments now use field kits. Apparently Price was too busy writing patois to do his homework.
And as if all that weren't bad enough, Richard Price sinks to the level of such hack writers as Joseph Wambaugh with his chronic and painful use of overwrought similes -- e.g., on page 302 we read that Billy "sat like an immobile blur, seeming to materialize and vanish without moving: a radio station on a highway." If that's your idea of fine writing, perhaps you should be reading Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang.
In sum, it's yet another grave disappointment to come out of New Yawk. Wossamotta wit dem, anyways? Huh?
Book Review: An amazing accomplishment
Summary: 5 Stars
There's something Dostoevskian about Richard Price's writing for his way of ensnaring a whole atmosphere and richly turning it into an authentic aesthetic environment. He captures Lower East Side New York just as Dostoevsky does for St. Petersburg, with a full set of tensions and passions, blazing and smoldering, all full of life. And while Price lacks Dostoevsky's all-too-Russian tendency to throw prose economy out the window, the effect is just the same: this writing may floor you, and you might not want it to end.
The plot centers on the shooting of bartender Ike Marcus and the investigation of restaurant manager Eric Cash. Ike is a twenty-something writer-to-be/waiter whose artistic and cultural ambition comes off as doggedly annoying to Cash, who is Ike 10 years crustier and later, struggling to accept the denouement of his writing career, which --- as for so many young, hip, New York pseudo-literati --- failed before it began. As the investigation trudges on, Price uproots the political and socio-economic history and tensions of the neighborhood, and expands his lens to include an impressive and exciting array of characters and subplots.
There are three characteristics in LUSH LIFE that make it an amazing accomplishment. The first, it goes without saying, is the dialogue, which may be the best you've ever read or heard. If one has heard anything about Price, it's his virtuosic capacity for dialogue. Cops, hipsters, recovering hipsters, ethnic populations and every other supporting cast member sound crystal clear, saying just as much with the style of their speech as their content.
The second is his flair for tension. On the most basic level, the neighborhood is experiencing the clash of young, white gentrification, which seeks to push out the local ethnic communities enough to feel safe at night but not so much as to feel like midtown (though for some that may not be far enough). This modern arrangement sharply clashes with the Jewish-tenement history of the area (one man has converted a de-sanctified synagogue into his house --- but has another house for sleeping in). The hipsters are at war with themselves in an arms race for authenticity, which only pantomimes their fakery.
On a formal level, Price uses many of the alluring conventions of typical crime fiction, complete with a male-female cop duo that is actually original and interesting, while resisting the pull of trite genre fiction. And on a more individual scale, the lush characters of this novel are full of interpersonal tensions, and most of them are conflicted souls themselves. Price shows both sides of these stories but is more or less unforgiving as he paints few truly admirable characters and fewer heroes. But this isn't take-no-prisoners vigilante writing. There is a supple humanity in each of these souls, and while there is little heroism here, there's also little villainy.
Price's third gift is his ability to construct a city in letters. When reading LUSH LIFE, one feels transported into the thick of the Lower East Side's ugliness and beauty. This novel is endlessly expansive, and for every major plot line, there is enough character complexity and hidden narratives that demand one turns back and explores the side streets. A third of the way through, the more poetic writing slips away, but before disappointment sets in, this plot sculpted into a whole world invites the reader into its clutches. Good luck letting go; you may not wish to.
The appeal of this book is the appeal of New York itself: its beauty, its ugliness, the beauty from that ugliness, the constant change and destruction, overturning of the present that conjures ghosts from the past. Price says it best: "what really drew him to the area wasn't its full-circle irony but its nowness, its right here and nowness, which spoke to the true engine of his being, a craving for it made many times worse by a complete ignorance of how this `it' would manifest itself." LUSH LIFE destroys temporality, meshing past, present and the hopes and fears of the future. In doing so, it stretches into an infinite complexity that vibrantly photographs the landscape of our contemporary urban cultural consciousness.
--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz
Book Review: Another keeper!
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes, this is a crime novel and the principal murder is shattering but it's also just one ingredient in a tragic stew of cops, thugs, and other walking wounded. The chief investigators find themselves hopelessly entangled in the lives of the victimized. A theme this author likes to explore. Price colors his characters with rich detail and creates dialogue that sings like urban poetry. This is like a literary version of the great HBO series "The Wire". He is one of the best novelists working today and I highly recommended it!