Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard PriceEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-03
ISBN: 0312428227
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel
Book Review: Unique Take on Procedurals
Summary: 5 Stars
In Richard Price's Lush Life: A Novel, Matty Clark, an Irish New York City police detective, investigates the murder of a young white man by a teenager from the inner city. Eric Cash, a witness to the murder, struggles to put his life back together while feeling the full effect of the crime.
As I read this novel, I couldn't help comparing it to the myriad of police procedurals on television. While the detectives on L&O typically find eye witnesses with remarkable recall, and the investigators on CSI and NCIS have outstanding technology, Matty is stuck with the more realistic scenario of unreliable witnesses, no murder weapon, no leads, and indifferent bosses. He can't even get a paraffin test (gunshot residue test) three hours after the murder. Matty's no Sherlock Holmes on this case (he's not supposed to be), but you do see a certain brilliance he maintains in getting a modicum of effort out of his boss. In short, Matty is left to chance and his own devices.
Price gives us deep glimpses not only into Matty's head, but also the killer's, as well as Eric's. Each is sympathetic in his own right. We get to see the gut-wrenching abuse the murderer is subjected to, along with the poverty he lives in. We see a bunch of hustlers - his "friends" - who never travel too far outside the parameters of their neighborhood in the projects of the Lower East Side. The greater part of New York might as well be as far away as China. Meanwhile, we see the haunting effects of the murder both on Eric and the victim's family. This is a novel that's as much about New York as it is about a murder in New York. Through the characters and the story, Price castigates the self-perpetuating system that both created the killer and the victim.
Yet this is still a story of survival. A limping, struggling, sometimes jaded survival, but survival all the same.
Summary of Lush Life: A Novel
A National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Lush Life is a tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, it's residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the "other" lower east side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidiscopic portrait of the "new" New York.
Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There's a crime at the heart of the story, but you don't read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they're really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. --Tom Nissley
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