Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price
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Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel
Book Review: Gritty, above-average, New York police procedural.
Summary: 4 Stars
"Lush Life" received unprecedented exposure and extravagantly positive reviews in The New York Times. It began on March 2nd with a highly flattering portrait of the author by Charles McGrath. On March 4th, Michiko Kakutani weighed in with a glowing endorsement ("a dazzling prose movie of a novel.") Then - amazingly - a second, equally ebullient, review by Walter Kirn in the Sunday Books section on March 16th. So many column inches for just one book - somewhere the debut novelists whose efforts didn't get reviewed to make room for the Price love-fest are weeping.
Does it merit all the hype? Depends on what you're looking for, I suppose. Price does get the specifics of his Lower East Side milieu exactly right. His characters are believable and fully three-dimensional. His knack for dialog is as phenomenal as all the reviewers say. My only real criticism of "Lush Life" pertains to its plot, which was serviceable, but no more than that. The book runs to about 450 pages, and somewhere around page 275 it starts to meander. A couple of subplots (a flirtation by the lead detective, the problems of his sons who live in upstate New York) have no real bearing on the main story and do little to advance the plot. The final resolution is somewhat random - it's the result of a chance encounter and could just as easily have been introduced a hundred pages earlier. Which would have improved the book.
But, although "Lush Life" was not the most tightly constructed police procedural I've ever read, it was very good, and extremely readable. Well worth adding to your reading list.
Book Review: Fast-Paced Novel of the Contemporary Big City
Summary: 5 Stars
Richard Price, author of "Freedomland" and a scriptwriter for "The Wire," writes about New York City. His novels are fast-paced, gritty and real. The dialogue is slangy and real, but this does not exclude the reader so much as take him or her on a headlong, cinematic ride through the big city streets and poor, police and criminal cultures about which Price writes.
"Lush Life" is about a murder that brings together lifestyles and social classes: the poor kids from the lower East-Side projects, artists and hangers-on of the gentrified lower East-Side, middle-class parents who try to keep control of their children and thereby come up against people and social changes that they don't understand, and the blue-collar police detectives and street officers who keep the peace and, when that fails, try to obtain justice for victim and perpetrator alike. The middle-class parents of a shooting victim and families of his killers all wanted their kids to have a good life, and the tragic intersection of these two cultures points up the economic and social disparities in our society and demonstrates that all suffer as the result of such inequities. Love is hard to find in a world in which all scramble to survive and opportunities for connection are fleeting. Empathy is merely a police interrogation method in a City in which dreams bloom and fail in an atmosphere of greed and oppotunism.
Price makes his points without didacticism and bombast; this novel is a compelling read that instructs subtlely while delighting (even if grimly) mightily.
Book Review: Newly Introduced to Richard Price - And I'm Impressed
Summary: 4 Stars
This is my first Richard Price novel. Not as good as I thought, but better than lots of books on the market.
Love his dialog, and his knowledge of the language of the city. He seems totally convincing to me. He knows these people.
Somewhat like a Dostoevsky novel, there's a crime at the center, but the book is about the ripples sent forth from the act.
Police are involved. Reluctant and enthusiastic witnesses. The shooter and his world of abuse. All are highlighted, stirred to some sense of self-worth, self-awareness by a rather random, casual crime.
The shooting means so little to the shooter until he and his friends see the stir it makes in the community. He writes hip-hop style poetry in his notebook that reveals his new sense of power. But the power in his poetry keeps meeting his random, fearful life.
He's the hero of his own made up story. But, he's dogged by the fact that the shooting was not a bold, brazen act, but a flinch, an act of cowardice. He keeps trying to live up to his new self-image without much success.
One of the most memorable scenes in the book shows him with his gun trained on the head of his sleeping step-father, while his mother looks on from another room. She slowly backs out of the room and simply goes to bed. She knows him.
The book loses its momentum when all the plots and subplots start flying about. But, at its core, a deeply engaging book about life lived in too-close proximity - to each other, and to death.
Book Review: More here than the great dialogue
Summary: 5 Stars
For me, it was the characters that made "Lush Life", not just the dialogue, and Price seems to be able to make a name into a person with just a few words. I liked this book because it was a police procedural in which the victims, witnesses and perpetrators of the crime around which it centers were each treated fairly by the author. I was interested in all of them.
Price really has the "show, don't tell" thing down. He's never preachy or morbid, like some crime-fiction authors, but doesn't shy away from the tension created by a neighborhood that is a gentrifying ex-ghetto cozying up to the modern-day projects. At the beginning of the book, the author makes the reader feel satisfyingly involved in the intense questioning of murder suspect Eric Cash by detectives Matty Clark and Yolanda Bello, but by the time it is revealed that Cash didn't do it, the reader feels as sleazy and as sorry as the interrogators do for how they leaned on him. Cash is a weak person -- and Clark and Bello are flawed, too -- but they are all very human. So are the neighborhood lawyers, reporters, crazies and thugs, and the young shooter himself.
Price unflinchingly calls the racism, classism and PD bureaucracy as he sees them, but injects enough humor into the book that reading it is a sweet experience, not a sour one. "Lush Life"'s main draw isn't the plot, which is fairly standard. The best thing about the novel is the people who inhabit Price's Lower East Side, good, bad and indifferent.
Book Review: Cynical, Amusing, and Masterful
Summary: 5 Stars
I was quite displeased when I finished LUSH LIFE. Not because the novel was anything less than vastly impressive, but because I accidentally left it on the airplane I was reading it on! So much for my dog-eared pages referring me to particularly sterling examples of Price's memorable and witty dialogue.
A recent NEW YORKER article points out that (like Elmore Leonard), Price's ballyhooed skills in writing dialogue may overshadow his other writerly resources. But while LUSH LIFE does an engrossing and masterful job of revealing the curious archaeology of the Lower East Side, its plot is... a red herring. And not only is the storyline frustrating, the book prominently features the most exasperating fictional character I can remember meeting. (Namely, Billy, the father who messily grieves for his murdered son.)
And that leaves us with a large cast of characters (project kids, aspiring actors, lifers on the police force) talking and talking to each other. And what talk it is! Regarding the unexpected urban patois that he employs, Price revealed to interviewer Terri Gross that he simply makes up much of his slang. That way, he doesn't have to worry about getting dated. And Price is so good at it, his police procedural transcends genre conventions and becomes something uniquely his own.
Also recommended: The Wire - The Complete First Season