Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price
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Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel
Book Review: The why
Summary: 4 Stars
Richard Price is one of the rare crime writers who tries to get the details right, but he's interested in more than the "how"; he's interested in the "Why". He generally takes a topic "ripped from the headlines" and tries to understand it better than it could be understood by strict nonfiction. The high calling of fiction is to help us make the leap into another person's life, to expand our sphere of empathy. In this Price excels. What's it like to be a low-level drug dealer ("Clockers")? ; how could the police believe a woman's story that her children were kidnapped by a black man ("Freedomland")?; How did a high school teacher end up victimized by his former students ("Samaritan")?; And now, in "Lush Life", how could police brutalize a witness to a crime? Price doesn't make things up; he choreographs them. True, "Lush Life" ends with some obvious symbolism that's a little too tidy for real life, but real life is often too harsh and messy to make into a book, at least a book that people will read. In crime novels the murderer is caught and punished because we need that to happen; we need fiction to organize reality into a framework that allows us to sleep at night. The best authors can balance the need for honesty with the need for little white lies.
Book Review: Neither Lush nor Lively
Summary: 2 Stars
Is it fair to review a book that one hasn't finished? As a good friend of mine has said, "You don't have to finish an apple to know it's rotten."
I'm not sure what Richard Price intended this book to be. It's not a mystery: We know who the murderer is less than halfway through the novel. It's not a thriller: The plot--what little there is of it--is thin and boring. It's not a character study: The characters are interchangeable and forgettable.
The novel centers on one Eric Cash, wrongly accused by the police of murdering his fellow bartender. A promising beginning--but then, after pages and pages of minute description of the cops interrogation of Cash, he is released after the evidence against him collapses! So now the cops have to search for the real murderer--but we already know who he is: a would-be gangster adolescent who probably shot Cash's friend by accident. (I'm not giving anything away here--this is all revealed less than halfway through the book).
I don't know why this book has received the accolades it has--a dull, dull effort. Read Stieg Larsson's novels if you're in the mood for a relentlessly gripping mystery with fully realized characters.
Book Review: Better as a film
Summary: 2 Stars
I read this book with high expectation because it was highly recommended by a book critic I respect. I had many problems with this book. I have never before read a book full of such lame, hackneyed characters such that you just do not care what happens to them. The characters were not even of those that you like to hate. I was hoping that the author would linger a bit more on the despair and desperation of wanna-be artists, but this was just barely touched upon. I understand that the author was trying to portray "real-life" repartees, but this was completely lost on me due to ineffective utilization of police and street jargon. There are authors out there who use this similar type of literary device but are more effective because you understand what is going on even if you are not familar with detective speak or street hustler banter. The book reads more like some sort of a screenplay, which does not work in print media. Maybe this book will get made into a movie and more people will like it. The description of the hum and din of New York and its inhabitants was well done.Book Review: confusing punctuation but otherwise ok
Summary: 1 Stars
I've never read a Richard Price book before. I saw this book recommended on Strand bookstore's web site on the top 10 list for 2008. I wanted to check it out (1) b/c I had just been to NY on vacation and thought it would be cool to read a novel that takes place there. (2) I was looking for something fresh to recommend as my choice for my book club in a few months.
I had to push through the first chapter. And just as I was getting a tad intrigued by one of the stories characters, Detective Matty Clark, I realized the punctuation in this novel was a tad out-of-wack. There are question marks in confusing places. And at the end of very obvious questions being asked by the characters (who,what,when,where) there are no question marks at all! It's nuts.
BUT after you get past that, the book gets better. You really end up more or less caring for these people.
I was a tad premature in my rating cuz I rated the book before I had finished it. I now give the book a very modest *** 3 Stars.
Book Review: Very Lush, but Failed to Grab Me
Summary: 3 Stars
It's obvious from the first page that this is a well written cop story, but I guess I've spent too much time with John Connelly and Robert Parker. If I'm going to read a police procedural, I like the pace to move along a bit. This was a slow-going slog for me. I found myself being forever lead off the track of the story, almost as if Mr. Price had thrown me overboard and swimming back was devilishly hard.
Still, the story, once I managed to get into it and filter out all the extraneous info, was all right. A couple kids from the hood rob three white guys who are drunk, one gets shot, one passes out and one runs away and a lot of lives get changed. Whack off about a hundred pages, tightened it up and there is a story here. Mr. Price is a great writer, to be sure, but if you want to tell a story, you've gotta hold your reader's interest. Sadly a superb command of dialogue and jargon don't a grabbing story make.