Lush Life: A Novel by Richard Price Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel
Book Review: Another slice of life from Richard Price
Summary: 4 Stars
Book Review: As good as you'd expect from Price
Summary: 4 Stars
Richard Price's writing career has established him as an author who can do it all, from novels to movies to TV, and after a few years of contributing his talents to the dearly departed TV classic The Wire he's returned to the printed word in a big way with Lush Life. Like a great deal of Price's work it has its overly slow spots, but Lush Life still marks a significant step up in quality from Price's last book, the merely good Samaritan, and comes pretty close to the level of the classic Clockers. It's both a heavily detailed crime procedural and a sweeping urban drama, with a wide-ranging scope that captures the aftermath of a startling crime from the viewpoint of everyone affected, from witnesses to perpetrators to detectives to friends and family. Much like Clockers, it uses an early murder and its subsequent investigation as a jumping-off point for an examination of the internal tensions and pressures that impact cities and their put-upon residents. In the process, it showcases all of Price's enormous gifts as a storyteller: his mastery of place; his knack for almost frighteningly believable dialogue and characterization; and above all else his unmatched ability to translate discomfort and confusion onto the page.
As usual for Price, Lush Life is less about plot than about characters and setting, with an exacting attention to detail and tough-edged urban realism that marks much of the best crime fiction. Price's insight into the minds of his protagonists allows you to feel sympathy for them even when they behave in a less-than-exemplary manner, and even the gallery of supporting characters who fill out the periphery are fully realized and have stories of their own to tell. Even the city of New York itself becomes a character, ethnically diverse, rich with history, and home to people with aspirations to be just about everything except for what they actually are. Echoing one of the best of the many great aspects of The Wire, Lush Life takes place in a world in which few people get to be better or worse than anyone else; the great mass of its characters lie somewhere in a vast and ambiguous middle ground. In a refreshingly sharp contrast to TV shows where cops have all the answers, Lush Life finds its homicide investigators plagued by flawed eyewitness testimony, office politics, time and manpower crunches, and simple inertia.
Although Price doesn't make much of an effort to conceal his killer's identity, the book's plot itself isn't particularly different from standard murder-mystery fare. Shortly after being introduced, Ike Marcus, an energetic young bartender and aspring actor in a Lower East Side filled with similar types, is fatally shot during a robbery gone wrong after a night out at the bars. Emerging from the confusion of the early investigation, the story eventually coalesces around four central characters: Matty Clark, the lead investigator on the case; Billy Marcus, the victim's father; Tristan Acevedo, the apparent triggerman; and Eric Cash, the victim's boss and a witness to the shooting, whom Matty quickly fixes upon as his prime suspect. Between them these four widely disparate protagonists struggle under a wide range of unfulfilled aspirations and personal issues, all of which are magnified as they try to go on with their lives following a life-altering event. The book actually reaches its peak early with the chaotic, maddening rush of the investigation's early stages and the gut-wrenching interrogation of Eric by Matty and his partner, a scene laden with dramatic irony as the detectives put all of their energy into breaking the will of a suspect whom we know is really innocent. When the case loses some its momentum the book does as well, with Price getting more and more into the character arcs at the occasional expense of narrative drive. There were a few times, most notably a rather awkward memorial service for the murder victim, that I couldn't help but wish Price would move things along, superbly rendered as they may have been.
Any pacing issues aside, though, Lush Life is still a compelling piece of urban crime fiction from a master of the style. As always, Price's individualistic writing style and extensive knowledge of city life makes for fascinating reading even when his characters are doing nothing more than talking. Anyone who would rather watch drying paint than another episode of the latest CSI or Law and Order incarnation is advised to check it out.
Book Review: As real as life gets
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoyed this book thoroughly. It succeeded as a plausible procedural, as a description of city life, and as a tragedy. Every character is utterly plausible, and nobody acts implausibly in the service of the plot at any point. It's not as exciting as a typical thriller novel, but it's amazingly vivid and real.Book Review: At it again
Summary: 4 Stars
'Lush Life', unsurprisingly perhaps, reads like hybrid of two of his previous novels, 'Clockers' and 'Freedomland'. But where 'Freedomland' got bogged down in a total lack of movement, 'Lush Life' sets out a more vivid landscape and cast and with the lead detective Matty Clarke, a more interesting character to dissect the city. Price's strength remains the clarity with which he sets out the divisions of the city. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the projects back up against the tenements, once filled with immigrant families, now charging their descendants $1500 a month for the same tight quarters. Price has great fun with the self conscious hipsters who've come to populate the area, the way in which the rest of the neighborhood tends to operate as if the intruders are invisible and how the police seem to be the major link between the two groups. It's a portrait that Price paints well, but as always with Price, this isn't so much a who-dunnit more than a why'd-he-do it? The characters are, for the most part, well drawn, particularly Eric Cash, a second rate actor, first rate restaurant manager. On the down side, the victim's father, granted many pages of description, never quite comes to life and that deprives the book of an underlying grief that would have turned it from the very good to the great.Book Review: Best I've read since MYSTIC RIVER
Summary: 5 Stars
LUSH LIFE is the best crime novel I've read since MYSTIC RIVER. Like MYSTIC RIVER, the emphasis is on characterization and setting. The plot is nothing much to brag about. Three men, a bartender, a restaurant manager, and an aspiring actor are held up after clubbing until early in the morning. The bartender refuses to give up his wallet saying "Not tonight, my man" and the gun goes off, killing him.
When two unreliable witnesses point to Eric Cash, the restaurant manager, as the shooter, the investigation heads in the wrong direction. When Matty Clark, the lead investigator, puts Cash through the third degree, he becomes an uncooperative witness.
Price is a master at characterization, especially the minor ones. There's a little Chinese man who may have been robbed by the same hold-up team who's simply a scream. Of the major characters Yolanda, one of Matty's partners, stands out above the rest. She put the "c'" in compassion, but she can be hard when she needs to be, and she's not afraid to put Matty in his place when he needs it. She's also very funny and does a spot-on impression of Matty complaining about "the brass." Billy Marcus, Eric's father, who feels guilty about not being around when his son was growing up, will tear your heart out. He wants to help with the investigation, but he's more of a hindrance than a help until almost the end. To complicate matters, Matty falls for Billy's wife.
Like Dickens and London, Richard Price must spend most of his time walking around New York City. He knows the place like the back of his hand. There's a scene where Fenton Ma, a Chinese detective, interviews a potential witness who sleeps on a plank in a crowded tenement, and sublets it to another Chinese man while he's working. Price also takes us inside the home of Harry Steele, owner of the upscale restaurant where Eric Cash works. It's a former synagogue and Price zooms in on the Jewish astrological tiles, pointing out that there are no people in the representations of the various signs. He also takes us inside BD Wing Funerary that sells paper replicas of everything from Gucci loafers to three-story private houses. The replicas are for dead people. You burn them at Chinese funerals so the dead guy can take them with him into the afterlife.
Thematically, the novel is about more than just a sense of physical loss, Eric Cash, once an aspiring actor and screen writer, hates himself because he fell for the lure of fame when he was really always only a waiter. Matty Clark also has two sons who are heading down the wrong path. He can't help but wonder if they would have turned out better if he'd been around while they were growing up. There's a sort of "There but for the grace of God" thing going on as well. Tristan, the trigger man during the hold-up, is a sympathetic character in many respects. He lives with his abusive former step father, his dead mother's former husband, and he babysits "The Hamsters," his former step father's children from his new relationship. He's really a good kid, as Yolanda intuits immediately of course, but he doesn't know how to be a man and has no role models.
Early on, LUSH LIFE can be a little off-putting in respect to language. It's hard to interpret some of the slang, but Price is really showing the reader respect by not spelling out every little thing for him. Hang in there. Eventually, it`ll grow on you.