Freedomland [Hardcover]

Richard Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 1998

The celebrated author of Clockers delivers his most compelling and accomplished novel to date.

A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night.

So begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting?

Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career.

As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story.

At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Freedomland, Richard Price returns to the gritty terrain he first explored in Clockers. This time, the fictional (but all too convincing) urban eyesore of Dempsy, New Jersey, is convulsed by a high-profile carjacking. A single mom named Brenda Martin insists that a man stopped her car, yanked her from behind the wheel, and drove off with the vehicle--and her young son. Behind these horrific facts looms another: the victim is white and the perpetrator is black. Immediately the racial calculus of American life comes to bear on the crime, which becomes a focus for long-smoldering animosities. As a three-ring circus of media, cops, and gawkers converges on the crime scene, Dempsy and the adjoining white community of Gannon seem primed for an explosion. Price passes the narrative baton back and forth between Lorenzo Council, an ambitious black detective, and Jesse Haus, a no-less-ambitious reporter for the local paper. Lorenzo's street-smart, agitated voice is the more convincing of the two. Jesse, with her frantic compulsion to squeeze local color from the crisis, never quite attains three dimensions--although her outsider's relationship to her material suggests some faint, fascinating echo of the author's. In any case, Price allows the story to proceed at an irresistible slow burn. His ear for dialogue is as sharp as ever, and nobody casts a colder or more accurate eye on our fin-de-siècle urban existence.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in the same blasted New Jersey ghetto as his much-admired Clockers (1992), Price's first novel since that bestseller is less a sequel than a monumental complement played in minor key, a re-visitation by an author who's older, sadder, wiser. The story flows from an event drawn from headlines: Brenda Martin, a white woman, staggers bleeding into a hospital to claim that her car has been hijacked by a black man?with her four-year-old son in the backseat. The jacking allegedly occurred in the park that divides the largely black city of Dempsey from the white-dominated city of Gannon. In response, Gannon cops seal off and invade D-Town, inflaming racial tensions and attracting an army of media. As in Clockers, Price again scans urban life through two protagonists, one black, one white?here, black Dempsey cop Lorenzo Council and white local reporter Jesse Haus. As both draw close to grief-crazed Brenda, one question propels the narrative: Is she telling the truth? The answer and its violent aftermath are equally inevitable, as Price snares the surface and the substance of America caught in a slow-motion riot of racial rage. His language is street-fresh, his dialogue as if eavesdropped; his characters are soulful, flawed, dead real. Price's experience as a screenwriter (The Color of Money, etc.) shows in the predictable dramatic arc of his tale, but the novel is no less powerful for its popular bent. Within its structural confines, the story line veers in unexpected directions, with each detour bringing readers closer to Price's ultimate vision?that our nation's hope lies not in social movements but in the flame of humaneness that flickers in each of us, cop and criminal, black and white. 125,000 first printing; $175,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPB alternates; first serial to the New Yorker; film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount for $2 million; simultaneous BDD audio; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Books; 1st edition (May 11, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767900243
• ISBN-13: 978-0767900249
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (83 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,113,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Has some great moments, but drags in places, March 2, 2006

By 

B. McEwan "yellokat" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Freedomland (Paperback)

I'm glad that I read this book, although there were a number of places where I felt that the author should have picked up the pace in order to maintain momentum and reader interest. While this novel is a crime drama, the fact that it deals with matters of race, trust and the elusive nature of truth makes it worthy of more consideration than the usual page turner.

I won't recount the plot, as an outline of the action is easily available elsewhere. I would like to single out a couple of passages, though, because they highlight the elegant prose that Richard Price is capable of and also struck a chord with me in that I have encountered similar situations in my own experience.

Take, for example, the opening of chapter 11, "The Dempsey County jail stood half demolished, and the only surviving section of exterior wall, the southwest corner, was a grotesquely defiant crumble of plaster and brick, a raised fist thrust into the flawless blue of a hot summer morning. The prison bars, running the entire length of the building but hidden from view for ninety years by a sooty gray facade, had now, in these final days, revealed the building for what it truly had been: a seven story cage."

The beauty of the writing, combined with the startling and rather violent imagery of the fist and the cage, made a strong impression on me and bore home the stark reality that jails are cages in which we shut up our fellows like animals, often when they are innocent. I have not read many other novels that are so evocative and at the same time hard hitting.

Another passage that really hit home with me is this one, near the end of the book, which is an excerpt of a conversation between two black men, one a cop and the other a suspect: "I don't know too many bald-faced crackers, to be honest. I mean...but still, it's like most white people -- for me -- I feel like they're not so much talking to me as they're *watching* themselves talk to me -- like, admiring themselves talking to me -- and I play this guessing game. How many minutes into this conversation -- no matter what we're talking about right now -- could be sports, the market, could be the weather -- but how many minutes is it gonna take for *race* to come up. How long is it gonna take for the fact that it's a white person talking to a black person to take over and change the subject, turn the subject into something racial. It never fails. *Never.* And I don't know how you deal with it, but for me it's nerve-racking, and it's boring."

This blew me away, and I found myself thinking back to recent conversations I had with black people, hoping that I didn't do that, but having this underlying worry that maybe I did. The interactions among people in day to day life are never simple, but race makes everything more complex and I really appreciate the way that Price acknowledges that fact.

For me, Price didn't over dramatize or over emphasize the role that race plays in all situations, never mind something as volatile as the disappearance of a child. And his characterizations seem dead on, not only for those characters who exemplified people I have met in my own life, but for characters who I can only imagine knowing. Take the creepy Friends of Kent, for example, who are a group of volunteers who search for missing kids. The personalities of these folks seem very believable, as does the character of Brenda, the mother who is the centerpiece of the story.

Overall, I recommend this book to those who enjoy a provocative character study. But if you're looking for a good crime thriller, Freedomland is probably a bit heavier than you really want. This is actually a story about a woman's denial of her failure to be a good parent, and the shattering results that her denial entails for many others in her community.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, April 17, 2003

By 

"frazernc" (charlotte, nc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Freedomland (Mass Market Paperback)

Hmmmm....with all due respect, I think some of the other reviewers here are missing the point. You don't pick up a 700+ page novel and not gear up for a long read, and if you know Price at all, you know he's not your standard thriller writer (which is a good thing, believe me). I'm a little mystified by the Price fan that didn't like it though--seems like we were reading two different books. And why see the titles of soul music songs in the book as a tired racial comment rather than the product of a character's completely deranged mind? At any rate, I found Freedomland to be an astounding achievement, with beautifully drawn fully human characters, pitch-perfect dialogue, plenty of action and tension, and a bone-deep sadness beneath it that's miles away from the prickly optimism of Clockers. Unlike Price's recent excellent Samaritan, it's not emotionally claustrophic either--Freedomland is in fact a modern urban epic, rich in character, depth, and texture. This is a book I continually recommend to people who believe that commercial fiction can't stir the soul. I will grant that reading Freedomland can ultimately be an emotionally exhausting experience, but that is what I look for in books--to paraphrase Kafka (at least I think it was Kafka), a book should be the axe that breaks the frozen lake inside us. And Freedomland is a great big axe.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too much and not enough, January 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Freedomland (Mass Market Paperback)

Like many of the others who have reviewed this book, I felt like it started out promisingly enough. It seemed like a nice, little ripped from the headlines drama with some open-ended observations about race and poverty and the enormous cultural and experiential divide that separates the haves from the have nots. But, apparently, that early promise was built on characters of sand, because they and their stories became a bit of an endless loop of shell-shocked realization and sweating inertia. If I were to give Price the benefit of the doubt I would say that his character's inability to act effectively, say anything succinctly or solve even the most basic of their own problems was a purposeful mirror held up to urban America. Hamlet-like, Price's characters wallow and writhe and go mad, and when they act, they do the wrong thing. Perhaps, he meant his character's sluggishness to be representative. Maybe he meant us to feel as trapped in the Armstrong Houses, in poverty, in addiction, in stupidity, in injustice as the characters who live there. If that was his intent, he definitely succeeded. At some point, however, it got to be too much. All the characters just allowed themselves to be buffeted about by circumstance until I felt like screaming. The character of the reporter, Jesse was the worst of the offenders. I found myself hoping that I would be provided front row seats to something really terrible happening to her. To sum up, I felt that this book had some structural problems. But, maybe this long road to nowhere is as good a metaphor for race relations in America as any other.