Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price
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Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel
Book Review: Underrated
Summary: 5 Stars
LUSH LIFE is much better than what you might conclude from many of the other Amazon reviews. I don't know what some readers expect from Price, but it must be much more than the average reader expects from, say, Elmore Leonard, because LUSH LIFE is much better than Leonard's recent output although not nearly so well received. Maybe it's because all people expect from Leonard is entertainment, whereas Price for some reason is thought to be aspiring to serious literature.
I frankly don't know whether or not Price really does aspire to be a "great novelist". I do know that what he writes are literate entertainments of near the first order. True, some of his plots might be somewhat flawed, although LUSH LIFE cannot be as readily critized on this score as "Freedomland" and "Samaritan". But the depictions of gritty urban life and the renderings of street dialogue are pretty damn realistic and, within my reading experience, as good as contemporary American fiction has to offer. With regard to his dialogue and comparisons to Leonard, Leonard's dialgoue is more hip and perhaps even wittier (although I think it often reflects the wit of the author rather than any actual person), but Price's dialogue is more realistic.
In LUSH LIFE, the setting is the multi-cultural Lower East Side of Manhattan. The plot revolves around the police investigation of a street-shooting/murder of a young actor-wannabe, Ike Marcus. At first the police zero in on Marcus's companion Eric Cash, but they soon realize that he is innocent (although only after alienating him as their one true eye-witness). Thence begins a tedious search for the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack and only through luck do the police nab the true culprit. The two principal police detectives, Matty Clark and Yolanda Bello, are the two heros and most memorable characters of the book (especially Yolanda). Somewhat unusual these days, the police are not corrupt; to the contrary, they are dedicated, hard-working, compassionate, and at times even brilliant, although Clark's and Bello's superiors are unduly and adversely influenced by bureaucratic politics.
But the plot really is secondary, as are the characters. The point is that both plot and characters are strong enough to provide the stage for a highly entertaining and literate portrayal of the Streets of Manhattan, circa 2005. I am torn between awarding 4 or 5 stars. Because it looks like the book is being underrated, I opt for giving it 5.
Book Review: Richard Price: powerful urban grit lit.
Summary: 4 Stars
Prolific writer, Richard Price, is perhaps best known for his novels including Clockers (1992), and for his screenplays The Color of Money (1986), Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1992), Ransom (1996), Shaft (2000), and for his work on the HBO series The Wire. Lush Life (his eighth novel) is characteristic Richard Price: powerful urban grit lit. Set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan (touted as a "quality-of-life" area of the City), the 2008 novel involves the complicated NYPD investigation of a murder on the street outside a cafe. Three men, cafe manager and aspiring writer Eric Cash, bartender Ike Marcus, and a friend of Marcus's, are confronted by two teenage muggers (Tristan Acevedo and Little Dap Williams, who live in a housing project), a random confrontation which results in the death of Marcus. While police are investigating the murder, Ike's grieving father, Billy (the most interesting character in the novel), begins acting erratically. What makes Lush Life such a compelling read is Price's talent for capturing the voices of New York City as an urban jungle of class and color in transition. Even tough New York Times' critic Michiko Kakutani acknowledges that Lush Life is "a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City," and "no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price--not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase." Lush Life demonstrates why Richard Price is considered such a master of the American urban crime fiction genre. Highly recommended.
G. Merritt
Book Review: Price's Best Yet
Summary: 5 Stars
In all fairness, I am an ex born and bred Bronx girl. I lived in lower Manhattan in the 70s when it was Funksville...and safe because the mafia still contolled the streets. I never ventured into the lower east side on the other side of Bowery as it was too scary.
Richard Price is an amazing writer. He has the ability to get into a character's head. His writing is compassionate to all sides of the story. His grit is about real life tragedy in novel form. This book is his best yet. I have been reading it non-stop throughout the weekend. Just as he did in his writing for The Wire, he approaches all sides of reality. Unlike when I lived on Elizabeth St., this part of NYC is now ultra-pseudo-hip. With gentrification comes those who watch, disenfranchised in their own neighborhood. The neighborhood becomes their "bank." Price weaves a tale with characters from all the various characters of this lower east side neighborhood. Not surprisingly, it contains echoes of Nicole duFresne's murder in that neighborhood. Outsiders who move in who just don't know how to react to those with harmful intent as they probably never lived in such a melting pot of race and monetary disparity. She said "what are you gonna do? Shoot us?" and got shot dead when all the muggers wanted was their wallets. Ike says, "Not tonight, my man" and he too ends up dead. As Price puts it, suicide by mouth. This books really shows the the disparity between people occupying the same neighborhood. Most of the action is confined to this neighborhood, which includes cops, corner boys, white youngsters trying to be hip, older hipsters who were once young, pioneers who lived in this pre-cool-funky neighborhood, Israelis, Arabs, Latinos and Asians. I love Price's writing as he painstakingly details a short period of time as it unfolds in this murder investigation. He hits the marrow of the bone with his characterization and I hinge on every word as a Price book release is an infrequent cause for celebration. What can I say. I love everything he writes. If you loved The Wire, you will love this. He captures a moment in the ever changing face of downtown Manhattan. BRAVO RICHARD PRICE.
Book Review: Where's the hero?
Summary: 3 Stars
I liked reading this book a lot more than I liked having read it. Mr. Price strings together scenes and narratives that keep you going and that seem quite honest a portrayal of life in the new big city -- but about halfway through your heart sinks a little with weariness because you get the strong feeling that nothing good is gonna come of all this, not for any of them, and, worse, there no one's whose worldview you've either copped to or admire or find promising of some moment of revalation of high poetry. The book is so realistic you know, more or less, what's gonna happen to these people and how they're gonna feel and think about it all.
I think, for those reasons, it would have been better told in the first person.
Also, his descriptive style while in places quite effective, too often slides into the unfocused and breathless. An example:
"With the dark, skinny mixologist from the No Name having done it to him again last night, weeping all the way through sex but with the added bonus of wailing and hiccuping sobs afterwards, "It's nothing personal, it's not you," Matty was the first one in the squad room Sunday morning, the peal of competing church bells--Spanish Catholic from Pitt, black Episcopalian from Henry--agitating the dust motes drifting above the sea of vacant cluttered desks."
What would Hemingway have said about that? Or Henry Miller? Or, even Graham Greene?
One dumb, inactive verb -- was -- and four present participles, plus a couple more -ing words thrown in, all in one sentence, and there are a lot of such sentences in the book. This kind of writing is completely indicative of an MFA and the bane of contemporary literature. It's all in getting an A for imagining a scene -- which Mr. Price does exceedingly well -- but none for the artistic rendering of an urgency to tell the reader something.
I'd have started that chapter: "The dark, skinny mixologist did it to him again. She wept all the way through sex..."
Plus, Mr. Price actually had "scudding clouds" in there somewhere. Hasn't the phrase been banned?
Book Review: The Flaneurs of the Lower East Side
Summary: 5 Stars
The theme of this amazing novel might best be described as "piling up": the piling up of visual and aural detail to describe the piling up of people, ethnicities, urban history, classes, and language that make up the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In Price's world, the passage of time is not conceived of as a linear progression but as an archeological layering, where each successive event leaves its mark and where the scars of the past are still visible. The density coalesces into a complex social ecosystem that buzzes along with uneasy tension until the smallest shifts throw everything out of balance.
Price effectively skewers all segments of this society, but he saves his harshest criticism for the newly minted MFAs who flood to the area and treat it as their own private Disneyland. Self consciously modeling themselves as modern-day flaneurs, these kids make the rounds from underground absinthe bars to midnight porno puppet shows at places with names like Zeno's Conscience. Giddy with the prospects of their future artistic successes, they look down on everyone else in the neighborhood, but especially those like Eric, who washed up at 35 are now too old to legitimately claim the title of actor/writer/bartender.
But the joy in this book doesn't come from the social critique; it comes from Price's language, and especially in his descriptions of the streets. Take for example this passage from the very beginning of the book, in which Eric is "seized with the notion of the Lower East Side as haunted, where "traces of the nineteenth century Yiddish boomtown" were "everywhere: in the claustrophobic gauge of the canyonlike streets with their hanging garden of ancient fire escapes, in the eroded stone satyr heads leering down between pitted window frames above the Erotic Boutique, in the faded Hebrew lettering about the old socialist cafeteria turned Asian massage parlor turned kiddie-club hot spot." The lushness of this language is evident on every page, and it is for this that I intend to turn back to this book again and again.