Samaritan [Hardcover]

Richard Price (Author)

Book Description

Series: Ay Adult - Price | Publication Date: January 7, 2003

After a lucrative television writing career comes to an abrupt end, ex–high school teacher Ray Mitchell returns to the New Jersey city of his birth—to rethink his life, reconnect with his teenage daughter and to spread the wealth on the housing project that reared him. He begins teaching again, embarks on an affair with a married woman from the old neighborhood and becomes a mentor to a former student recently released from jail.

Then, disaster: he is found beaten nearly to death in his own apartment. He knows who did it, but he’s not talking, and he refuses to press charges.

It is up to Detective Nerese Ammons—a childhood acquaintance from the projects—to get Ray to tell her what happened.

Alternating between investigations of the people in Ray’s life most likely to do him harm and listening to his fevered ramblings about their shared past as he slips in and out of consciousness, Nerese is charged not only with uncovering the perpetrator of this assault but with understanding what kind of victim is more afraid of
the truth than of his potential murderer.

The Washington Post Book World has hailed Richard Price as having “the best equipment a novelist can have—that combination of muscularity, insight and compassion we might call heart.” Samaritan is an electrifying story of crime and punishment, of character and place, of children and their keepers—a novel of literary suspense that explores what happens when, caught up in the drama of one’s own generosity, too little is given, too little is understood and the results threaten to prove both tragic and deadly.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Like his previous novels Freedomland and Clockers, Richard Price's Samaritan is a crime drama set in the explosive slums of fictional Dempsy, New Jersey. Ray Mitchell, a former TV writer, has returned to his hometown to reunite with his estranged teenage daughter, Ruby. Eager to contribute to his beleaguered community, Ray begins volunteering as a writing teacher at a local high school. When a brutal assault leaves him hospitalized, Nerese Ammons, a nearly retired detective and lost childhood friend of Ray's, investigates. She discovers, however, that while Ray can identify his attacker, he is unwilling to disclose their identity. Anxious to end her career with fireworks, Nerese continues digging, only to find that Ray made several generous donations to poor acquaintances and recently began a romantic relationship with the wife of an established criminal. While the case looks closed, Nerese continues to find evidence of Ray's troubled past and shortsighted altruism, increasing the number of possible assailants and suggesting Ray's complicity in the crime.

Price's narrative, which alternates between Ray's story and Nerese's ongoing investigation, gains momentum as the mystery nears resolution. Samaritan falters, though, in its awkward attempts at timeliness and, more acutely, its underdevelopment. The selfish, people-pleasing Ray is a multifaceted character, but he fails to inspire sympathy, while the savvy Nerese never escapes two-dimensional limbo. Price brings the streets of Dempsy to life, however, with informed, realistic descriptions and inner-city survivors like junkie-turned-independent-social-worker White Tom Potenza, who still "couldn't pass a pay phone without flicking the coin return, still stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of salvageable debris." While the plot will keep readers engaged, it's the world into which they're drawn that makes Samaritan a worthwhile visit. --Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly

Nobody does urban grit better than Price-or so it was said in the '90s upon the publication of Clockers and Freedomland. Price's first novel in four years doesn't belie that claim, but it isn't his best, despite some wonderful writing. Most impressive are the characters-and not only the principals, Ray Mitchell, a white TV writer recently returned to his predominantly black home city of Dempsey, N.J., only to wind up in an ICU with a crushed skull, and Nerese Ammons, black, Ray's childhood friend, now a cop determined to find out who swung the vase that put Ray down. The supporting characters, too, are blazing with life, as is Price's rich evocation of Dempsey's blasted cityscape. It's the plotting that's relatively weak. The novel is woven of two chronological strands, one starting with Ray's time in the ICU and focusing on Nerese's investigation, the other beginning with Ray's arrival in Dempsey and emphasizing his troubled relationship with his alienated wife and daughter; with his new girlfriend from the projects, Danielle; and with himself-for Ray is a self-loathing former cokehead whose desperate need for approval clouds his judgment time and again. The binary plotting is interesting, but a bit gimmicky and doesn't help the book's pace, and a narrative turn near the end involving Ray and his daughter feels contrived. Since Ray's need for approval prevents him from telling Nerese who conked him, the book is basically a whodunit. Few readers will guess the real culprit: is it Danielle's jealous jailbird husband? The erratic street artist Ray is supporting? Danielle? The questions will hold readers' interest but not seize it, and while many will enjoy as well as admire the novel, most won't be blown away by it. 150,000 first printing; simultaneous Random House Audio.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411151
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411151
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,408,693 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Samaritan, May 31, 2003

By 

Mike Newmark (Tarzana, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Samaritan (Hardcover)

I'll admit it: I was a sucker for detective stories for years. Bring me a Spenser novel, a cup of black coffee and a Barca-lounger, and I'd be happy as a clam. I'll also admit that, as I grew older, the spate of new mystery novels by Parker and Grafton and others began to seem dry, lacking in vitality. Sure, their protagonist heroes spat their share of wisecracks, but no amount of one-liners could hide the fact that most current mystery novels were devoid of substance and feeling. With Samaritan, Richard Price ups the ante fivefold on the detective story. He breathes life into it by giving the story and its characters a remarkable human touch, by going after our hearts as well as our nerves.

We meet Ray Mitchell upon his return to his birthplace of Dempsy, NJ, so he can start his life over. There, he begins teaching a creative-writing class at his former high school, reconnects with the residents at the Hopewell housing project where he was raised, and attempts to rekindle a relationship with his thirteen-year-old daughter whom he lost in the aftermath of a divorce. Ray is often generous, which is impressive considering he's had a less-than-perfect past, involving the loss of his daughter, a lowly cab-driving job, a perpetual addiction to cocaine, and finally, a letdown after an ever-so-brief stint as a TV-writer comes to an unexpected close.

Just as Ray begins to find his place again in Dempsy, he is found beaten almost to death in his apartment. Enter Nerese Ammons: a cop, a childhood friend of Ray, a former resident of Hopewell, and someone forever indebted to Ray for saving her life when they were just kids. Nerese feels morally obligated to take on Ray's case, but Ray obstinately refuses to identify his attacker and won't press charges. Nerese must now enter the abyss of Ray's past in order to solve the puzzle, while simultaneously working to keep her own life intact in the bleak and unforgiving Dempsy.

On the surface, Samaritan is made out to be a whodunit thriller, and it is, but to call it simply that would be doing the book and its author a great injustice. The strength of this book lies in the way it is written, and this is how Price brings his cast of characters to life. He records every nuance, every movement, every thought the characters possess behind their lines of dialogue, turning story characters into living, breathing people. They speak with mellifluous street-savvy, but don't be fooled. They may be hardened but their words simply glow with realistic emotion, at times expressing unrelenting urgency, at others, heartfelt compassion. Price gives all of his important characters vivid back-stories, important details of their lives and psyches, all of which may seem to some readers as unnecessary belaboring, but nonetheless clue us in to exactly what kind of people we are dealing with at certain points in the story. Simply put, Price makes us care about his characters and their various states because everything about them is real, filled with a kind of depth and humanity that can only be pulled off by an accomplished writer with an eye for the intricacies of human life.

Samaritan, all plot details aside, is about the powerful effect that adults have on children, and the similar effect children have on those adults. One of the many manifestations of this is shown in Ray's attempts to reconnect with his adolescent daughter, Ruby. Ruby has clearly distanced herself from her father following his return to Dempsy. Ray knows he's been guilty of poor fatherhood in the past and tries ceaselessly to mend the rifts, but Ruby is staunchly unyielding to her father's desperate attempts to reenter as an important part of her life. Without Ruby, Ray admits he feels as though he is nothing, hopelessly downtrodden. But Ruby is also powerfully affected by her father, shown by her stony revulsion towards him, the result of a debilitating sucker punch from her tainted past. The pain is felt by both: the child rejected by the adult and the adult rejected by the child, and the pain is felt heavily because the sacred relationship between father and daughter should be one of care, and not of heartache.

Price compels us to sink into the thriller he ravels for us, but in doing so, he never strays from the true meaning of the work. Each piece of the puzzle has a greater significance than its literal role in the mystery would suggest. We want to read on; we want to find out what happens not only for the sake of knowing Ray's attacker but also to learn a greater truth about life and people. It is as if we are a bit wiser by the end of the book, because we don't just know who dun it...we know what it is about the world that makes who dun it tick; the 'why' behind the mystery.

Richard Price thrusts us into a gritty, unfamiliar world with unfamiliar people, and by the end we couldn't feel more contrary. We know the town of Dempsy (love it or hate it we may), and we feel as though we grew up with these faces and their stories. We feel what they feel because we love them like people we intimately know. It's really for this reason that the story (and the mystery itself) has such depth: there are consequences for everyone involved in this web, not just the perpetrator. All of the characters must move their lives through the tumult of everything around them, some of them within inches of crumbling. In short, Richard Price has written a mystery novel where we feel something, where our thoughts and formulations coexist with our feelings and emotions quite harmoniously, and I believe that's precisely what a good reading experience should be.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific, January 14, 2003

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Samaritan (Hardcover)

In this masterful novel, former TV writer, cab driver, and drug addict Ray Mitchell moves home to Dempsey, New Jersey , after leaving a successful writing job in LA. Ray was raised in the projects, and now he wants to give back by teaching at his old high school. He also wants to be closer to his daughter, Ruby, who lives in nearby Manhattan. But before much of any of this can happen, Ray is assaulted in his apartment and in the hospital with a crushed skull. What he is not is giving out details to Nerese Ammons, the detective who's on the case. Richard Price takes the story from both Ray and Nerese's point of view and employs a flexible time line. Level after level of past and present are revealed to add depth, power, and real suspense to a completely engrossing and satisfying read. Price has a remarkable ear for dialogue, and knows places like Hopewell Houses in Dempsey inside and out. He is unsentimental about life in the projects. The characters are etched in such sharp relief that you know you`ve seen them somewhere.

It is a kind of liberation for readers to be in such capable hands that you know that whatever happens, you will not be disappointed. There are no false steps in "Samaritan," no easy choices, and no plays for sympathy for Ray or anyone else. It's tough, good, and a learning experience about not only about what it means to be a samaritan, but about how a really good novel should be written. Don't miss it.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No good deed goes unpunished, January 16, 2003

By 

Tim Windsor (BALTIMORE, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Samaritan (Hardcover)

The NY Times wrongly disses this book, calling it "hollow" and saying Price gives away the theme in the Epigraph, a Bible quote.

I'll spare you the King James; here's a modern English translation of the epigraph:

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. "

Safe to say, our hero, Ray, doesn't heed those words and, thus, a fine novel ensues. Price shows us what can go wrong when neediness occurs on both sides of the charitable transaction. For Ray, a simple "thank you" from God in heaven is not enough. He wants it here and now.

Despite the Times complaint cited above, I don't think Price spoon-feeds us here. He thrusts us into the middle of what seems an unfair situation (paraphrasing one of the characters here, we may find ourselves wondering, "what'd he do??") and slowly allows us to see the flaws at Ray's core -- flaws in an otherwise good man.