Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price
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Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel
Book Review: "Two eyewits trump no evidence."
Summary: 4 Stars
As Eric Cash and Ike Marcus are walking Ike's drunk friend, Steve Boulware, home from an all-nighter in New York City, they are confronted by two "dark" males, intent upon robbery. Eric immediately "gives it up," but Ike quietly approaches the robbers, saying "Not tonight, my man." Within seconds, he is dead, shot in the chest. Accounts of the robbery and murder differ among the witnesses, and the police, led by Det. Matty Clark, a long-time Irish cop, take Eric, a victim, into custody on suspicion, interrogating him and turning him into a permanent enemy.
New York's Lower East Side, where the action takes place, is changing. Bohemian students wanting to be poets and writers, like Eric and Ike, have moved in. Many long-time immigrant populations have moved out, and the neighborhood is racially and culturally mixed. Almost anything seems to go, socially, and drugs are an active part of the scene. Looming over the area are the Lemlichs, a series of project houses in which the residents do whatever they can to survive, often ganging up against a hostile outside world and resorting to drug sales for income and escape.
Det. Matty Clark, running the investigation, is stymied by the lack of evidence and witnesses, the reluctance of the neighborhood to talk, and the desire of his own department to close the case as soon as possible--without involving the press. Ike's father, Billy Marcus, numbed by the news of his son's murder, is reliving his life with Ike, alternately blaming himself, the police, and Ike's companions for Ike's death. Eric Cash, wanting to escape the horrors of the murder, is hoping to move elsewhere, the fruitlessness of his life as a writer finally recognized.
Famous for his ability to tell a story in the dialogue of street slang, author Richard Price creates a panorama of life in the city so vivid that it feels like an unpleasant movie unreeling behind one's eyes. The dialogue and the images it inspires are realistic, gritty, and often full of heartache, as characters grow. Their interactions become the clashes and miseries we experience in nightmares. As Price explores various points of view, he also shows the randomness of the characters' interconnections and the power of the city itself to alter dreams and the future.
As Price explores his characters and their behavior, he sometimes veers off into subplots which delay the story without adding significant new information. Matty Clark's problems with his sons, his brief flirtation with Billy Marcus's distraught wife, and a long section in which Steve Boulware conducts Ike's memorial service could have been shortened significantly, while still retaining thematic integrity. Price's vision is huge, and his ability to show the widening circles by which one event can draw in large numbers of unsuspecting characters is successful--despite the novel's excesses. n Mary Whipple
Clockers: A Novel
Samaritan (GMA June Pick)
Color of Money, Sea of Love, Night and the City: Three Screenplays
Book Review: "Not tonight, my man."
Summary: 5 Stars
"Lush Life" is my first audio book of 2009 and I doubt that I will find a better combination of author and reader the rest of the year. Richard Price is a master of dialogue regardless of the class or color of his characters and Bobby Cannavale, the television and movie actor giving life to the characters here, handles them all with ease.
Rather surprisingly, despite the length and heft of "Lush Life," its plot centers around a simple armed robbery that goes bad because of two of the people involved, one of them a victim, and the other, one of the robbers. Two people, each totally unprepared for what is happening to them at that moment, are suddenly eyeball-to-eyeball and, to the surprise of both of them, one is shot dead.
Ike Marcus, a young white guy out on the town with two friends, refuses to accept the fact that two black teens expect him to hand over his valuables despite the pistol one of them is aiming at him. After he mutters what would be his last words, "Not tonight, my man," he is struck by a single bullet and falls to the ground mortally wounded. On the other side of that pistol stands Tristan Acevedo, a young man holding a gun for the first time in his life and who is stunned to realize that he has reflexively pulled its trigger after Ike Marcus foolishly stepped toward him.
"Lush Life" is not a whodunit. There is never any doubt as to the murderer's identity or motive. Instead, Price takes a frank look at everyone involved in, or affected by, the crime: the three robbery victims, the two robbers, family and friends of all of them, the police charged with figuring it all out, and the people who live in the neighborhood where it all happens.
The book is largely conversational, perfect for an audio presentation, and the way that Price allows his characters to express themselves makes them seem very real. We get into the heads of those black kids living on the project streets, kids so caught up in the drug culture that they are oblivious to any other possibilities. We suffer along with Ike's father, an articulate man driven by confusion and despair to hang out near the crime scene in hopes that he will overhear someone bragging about the murder. We admire Matty Clark, a good detective and a decent man, who takes a personal interest in Ike's family and risks his own career by fighting to keep the investigation as active as possible. We sympathize with Eric Cash, another of the robbery victims, who has his life almost destroyed by what happens to him after the crime. We sneer at the way the robbery's third victim uses his fifteen minutes of fame to advance his show business career.
Even more amazingly, we come to know dozens of people around the core of main characters, each of them adding bits of color and detail to the world so clearly illustrated in "Lush Life." I seldom suggest that readers opt for the audio version of a book over its written one, but I am doing it this time.
"Lush Life" is a very good book, one you have to hear to really appreciate at its most powerful.
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: A brilliant novel of New York City
Summary: 5 Stars
Often, in my own personal grading system, a novel about crime and punishment that isn't by Dostoevsky, nearly always loses a point for that reason. Whether I bought the book in an airport may or may not, but usually does lose another star. "Lush Life" is not Dostoevsky, but it is a great and humane novel about a crime that is committed at the beginning of the book, is the story of the police investigation into the murder, and is told largely from the point of view of at least one of the characters most intimately involved in the case. "Crime and Punishment" is told mostly through the killer's point of view and "Lush Life" is told mainly through one police detective's POV. Forays into the interior monologues of other characters are upstaged by our anguished detective's - this may not be entirely intentional by the author - and his moral crisis (all novels about cops must be about moral crisis of one kind or another). Other similarities invite the comparison. And even though it is not a great Russian novel, "Lush Life" is a novel about place - New York City - that approaches greatness in its pitch-perfect portrayal of the interior life of people in and of that city.
But since it is literature, and even great literature can seem tedious at times, a potential reader might be wary that he/she would have to bring too much energy to reading the novel. Don't worry about that. This book is immediately engaging on many levels. Full of suspense and uncertainty - a novel told from the head of a NYPD detective could hardly avoid that - "Lush Life" is, among other things, a nail-biter story that passionately and primarily describes a police investigation into a murder that occurred in the lower east side of Manhattan, without sentimentality, but with the tenderest possible empathy for nearly all the characters, good guys and bad guys alike. The prose is diamond-sharp and satisfying without being self-conscious as so many works of "literary fiction" are. And it's realistic to the tiniest detail. In fact, I've never read or seen any books, films, television shows, etc., that even come close to describing the way things are actually done.
Although it would be misleading to call this "genre" fiction, If you are interested in the genre fiction about crimes, that also happens to be (great?) literature, this is the book for you. Although the story follows a familiar - but not quite formulaic - trajectory, it is not a cookie-cutter airport book, even if you buy it in an airport. The accomplished craft with which the novel is made makes "Lush Life" satisfying in a way most books of this genre cannot approach.
Book Review: Slice (After Slice, After Slice) Of Life
Summary: 4 Stars
Price's LUSH LIFE starts with a miracle: the Virgin Mary has appeared in the frost of a convenience store's glass freezer door. A line of penitent believers gathers, paying money for a chance to pray for a miracle of their own. The line is several blocks long, and it obstructs the entrance to a cafe where 34 year-old Eric Cash works. Out of fealty to his boss (an old friend), Eric and a coworker, Ike, join the line and make the Mary disappear by opening the freezer door.
Price's writing style is all about reality, all about authenticity. Not only is he a master of the click and flow of dialogue, but he also sets scenes with an inexplicable deftness, like someone simply flipping a switch that lights up a stage. Price's light is warm, encompassing, but not particularly sympathetic. It's no coincidence that his story starts with a miracle debunked, or that on the way to the miracle, Eric and Ike pass a church that has -- apparantly of its own accord -- collapsed into itself. Icons, metaphors, grand idealistic totems -- Price's novel doesn't have much respect for them. Even grander themes, larger purposes, these are all shrugged off in favor of more interesting minutia. It's hard not to be impressed by how eloquently Price illuminates every speck of grit, whether it's on the streets of the city or in the hearts of its citizens.
The story is "about" a mugging-turned-murder, but this is really just a jumping off point. Price uses this moment of accidental violence to spur a story that stretches its tentacles into all areas of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, from the bureaucratic busy-bodies that hamper justice more than they aid it, to the hood rats and gangster-wannabes who are trying to find a way to prove that their life isn't just another pointless miracle, another ruined temple. Much like The Wire (which Price has also contributed to), LUSH LIFE tries to be diplomatic with its details. No one is judged, not really, and nothing is left out.
This ends up resulting in what some might call "overkill." So anxious to provide an unadulterated slice of life, Price goes a little overboard with the details, with the facets, with the broad view. I'd use the old "forest for the trees" analogy here, except the trees in this case are so beautifully described. Still, the luxuriant attention to every speck and spot makes this slice of life novel read more like an entire pie of life. For those with big appetites, it comes highly recommended.