Richard Price deftly explores the urban world in his novels and screenwriting (Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan,**1/2 Mar/Apr 2003, and HBOâs The Wire), but critics agreed that Lush Life is perhaps his finest work of social realism yet. Compared to Tom Wolfeâs Bonfire of the Vanities for its adept intertwining of the crime and social novel, Lush Life just might be âthe greater achievementâ (Wall Street Journal). While offering a panoramic view of class and social tensions in Manhattan, Price also draws deep, rich characters (only one reviewer criticized the aspiring-artist persona). Priceâs dialogue and interior monologuesâ"from street slang to the vernacularâ"are simply stunning. A few reviewers cited some melodrama that detracted from Priceâs social-realist goal, but no one disputed the perfectly executed ending.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Review
"Mr. Price's most powerful and galvanic work yet, a novel that showcases his sympathy and his street cred and all his skills as a novelist and screenwriter . . . A visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City and some of its residents, complete with soundtrack, immortalized in this dazzling prosemovie of a novel."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "A big, powerful novel . . . Its real protagonist is the complicated, tragic, and endlessly fascinating American city street. . . . Outstanding."--Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A) "His prose has never felt more fluid, his plotting is spry. . . . Price's ability to capture and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and evanescent vocabulary of urban life cannot be over-praised: with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best, one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature."--Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books "Richard Price knows how crime sounds and smells, and he knows that it’s all tied up in race and class, two big subjects all too rare in American fiction. . . . Every sentence is a pleasure."--John H. Richardson, Esquire “Price interrogates the players--cops, perps, victims, witnesses--until each one gives up a great human truth hidden in his seedy little soul."--Time "Lush Life is lean, moving fast, and taking in large truths with a glance. . . . It's The Bonfire of the Vanities 2.0. Though Tom Wolfe's 1987 book remains one of the essential American novels, Lush Life is, in one way, the greater achievement."--Kyle Smith, The Wall Street Journal "An astonishing new novel . . . Price has a black belt in dialogue, with a Ph.D. in capturing the deadpan humor that helps cops stay sane. Lush Life is a serious book, with serious points to make, but it’s also a wicked pleasure to read."--Adam Woog, The Seattle Times "Richard Price is one hell of a raconteur ... opening any of his books means getting hooked—you turn the first page on the commute back from work and next thing you know, it’s 4am and you’ve polished off both the novel and an entire bag of Milanos."--Elisabeth Vincentelli, Time Out New York"With LUSH LIFE Richard Price has become our post-modern American Balzac. Except that he's a whole lot funnier than Balzac and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around, living or dead, American or French. He's a writer I hope my great-grandchildren will read, so they'll know what it was like to be truly alive in the early 21st century." —Russell Banks
"This is it, folks. The novel about gentrified New York, circa right now, that we’ve been waiting for. Richard Price understands what's happened to our beloved city, he writes dialogue like a genius, and he absolutely, genuinely cares. Unforgettable." —Gary Shteyngart “Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced. Wry, profane, hilarious, and tragic, sometimes in a single line, Lush Life is his masterwork. I doubt anyone will write a novel this good for a long, long time.” —Dennis Lehane “Price writes with the slightly manic desperation of someone determined to tell the absolute truth . . . This heightened, anxious awareness of moral and psychological complexity . . . is one of the accomplishments of first-rate writing.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review, on Freedomland About the Author
Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Stephen Amidon
Richard Price's new novel is set in 2002 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood that is not so much a melting pot as a cauldron of volatile elements that can be set off with the slightest spark. Among its uneasy mix of gentrifying yuppies, Chinese immigrants and beleaguered Latino and African-American residents, the peace is kept by the NYPD, whose Quality of Life Task Force implements the city's zero tolerance ethos under the motto "Everyone's got something to lose."
In the electrifying opening chapters of Lush Life, one person turns out to have everything to lose: Ike Marcus, a young white bartender at a swank local restaurant. After a long night of drinking, Ike, a would-be writer, is gunned down when he answers a mugger's demand for his wallet by saying, "Not tonight, my man." (A detective wryly refers to this sort of bravado as "Suicide by mouth.") Accompanying Ike were two other East Village scenesters, an aspiring actor named Steven Boulware, who survives the attack apparently because he was falling-down drunk, and Eric Cash, the manager at Ike's restaurant.
Eric, whose frustrated literary ambitions have left him saddled with an "unsatisfied yearning for validation," provides the police with the initial account of the crime, claiming to have escaped Ike's fate because he turned over his wallet. His testimony is sufficiently sketchy to raise the suspicion of Matty Clark and Yolonda Bello, two veteran detectives who catch the case. Eyewitnesses also challenge Eric's account. In a gripping interrogation sequence, Yolonda and Matty slowly wear down the stunned witness, ultimately accusing him of killing the younger man in a burst of booze-fueled envy. Eric is so unnerved by their going-over that he can only respond by doing "something that genuinely shocked Matty. With his mouth locked in a rictus grin, he rose to his feet and extended his wrists."
It would seem to be an open-and-shut case, but this is Richard Price, who in novels such as Clockers and Freedomland has shown himself to be more interested in exploring the complex social and psychological ramifications of crime than in simply cuffing the perps. Soon after Eric's arrest, Boulware wakes from his blackout to tell a tale of his own, while the eyewitnesses who implicated Eric in the crime turn out to be less than reliable. After keeping the reader in the dark for the first third of the book, Price reveals the truth of the matter, transforming his narrative from a whodunit into a police procedural where the mystery is not what happened, but what will happen next. It is a move that keeps Lush Life from achieving the gut-churning power promised in those fine opening chapters. Perhaps if Price had not dangled the prospect of a mystery before us, his decision to abandon it so early would not have produced the sense of deflation that ultimately pervades the book.
That said, Lush Life remains a vivid study of contemporary urban landscape. Price's knowledge of his Lower East Side locale is positively synoptic, from his take on its tenements, haunted by the ghosts of the Jewish dead and now crammed with poor Asian laborers, to the posh clubs and restaurants, where those inclined can drink "a bottle of $250 Johnnie Walker Blue Label" or catch "a midnight puppet porno show." In this "Candyland of a neighborhood," where kids from all over the nation come to "walk around starring in the movie of their lives," it is hardly surprising that an ambitious suburban boy believes he can front up to armed muggers and live to write a treatment about it.
Price's ear for dialogue is equally sharp. When a young student who witnessed the murder expresses shock that the detective interviewing her can quote T.S. Eliot, the beleaguered cop deadpans that "the apes that raised me were surprisingly intelligent." Officer Lugo, a member of the Quality of Life Task Force, explains to a just-arrested drug addict that he will cut him some slack only if the suspect gives up another criminal. "We keep wanting to help you out, man. . . . But it's a two-way river." When another suspect complains to Lugo that his sidekick is "like half-retarded," the cop immediately wonders: "How about the other half?"
In the end, Lush Life is most effective as a study of sudden crime and its lingering aftermath. Price depicts the corrosive effect of Ike's murder upon his family, particularly his father Billy Marcus, who lurches between anger and depression as he searches for some sort of redemption, never understanding that "there would be no relief for him from that grinding sense of anticipation he'd carried in his gut for the last few days, that no matter what came down the line, what measures of justice were ultimately portioned out, what memorials or scholarship funds established, whatever new children would come into his life, he would always carry in himself that grueling sensation of waiting: for a tranquil heart, for his son to stop messing around and reappear, for his own death."
Near the book's end, Billy forms a surprising emotional connection with the unsentimental Matty, who uses Billy's grief as inspiration to reach out to his own estranged sons. In this most diverse of neighborhoods, Price suggests that violence and the sorrow it creates are the only sure ways to bring people together.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
The Quality of Life Task Force: four sweatshirts in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run; their mantra: Dope, guns, overtime; their motto: Everyone’s got something to lose.
“Is dead tonight.”
The four car-stops so far this evening have been washouts: three municipals—a postal inspector, a transit clerk, and a garbageman, all city employees off-limits—and one guy who did have a six-inch blade under his seat, but no spring-release.
A station wagon coming off the bridge pulls abreast of them at the Delancey Street light, the driver a tall, gray, long-nosed man sporting a tweed jacket and Cuffney cap.
“The Quiet Man,” Geohagan murmurs.
“That’ll do, pig,” Scharf adds.
Lugo, Daley, Geohagan, Scharf; Bayside, New Dorp, Freeport, Pelham Bay, all in their thirties, which, at this late hour, made them some of the oldest white men on the Lower East Side.
Forty minutes without a nibble . . .
Restless, they finally pull out to honeycomb the narrow streets for an hour of endless tight right turns: falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, crêperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement,
tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Boulangerie, bar, hat boutique, corner. Iglesia, gelateria, matzo shop, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school, People’s Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Lady Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service, corner. And then finally, on a sooty stretch of Eldridge, something with potential: a weary-faced Fujianese in a thin Members Only windbreaker, cigarette hanging, plastic bags dangling from crooked fingers like full waterbuckets, trudging up the dark, narrow street followed by a limping black kid half a block behind.
“What do you think?” Lugo taking a poll via the rearview. “Hunting for his Chinaman?”
“That’s who I’d do,” Scharf says.
“Guy looks beat. Probably just finished up his week.”
“That’d be a nice score too. Payday Friday, pulled your eighty-four hours, walking home with what, four? Four fifty?”
“Could be his whole roll on him if he doesn’t use banks.”
“C’mon, kid”—the taxi lagging behind its prey, all three parties in a half-block stagger—“it doesn’t get better than this.”
“Actually, Benny Yee in Community Outreach? He says the Fooks finally know not to do that anymore, keep it all on them.”
“Yeah, OK, they don’t do that anymore.”
“Should we tell the kid? He probably hasn’t even heard of Benny Yee.”
“I don’t want to come between a young man and his dreams,” Lugo says.
“There he goes, there he goes . . .”
“Forget it, he just made us,” Daley says as the kid abruptly loses his limp and turns east, back towards the projects, or the subways, or, like them, to simply take five, then get back in the game.
Right turn after right turn after right, so many that when they finally pull someone over, and they will, it’ll take a minute to get their legs under them, to stop leaning into their steps; so many right turns that at three in the morning, six beers deep at Grouchie’s, everybody silently, angrily watching the one lucky bastard getting a lap ride in a banquette by the bathrooms, they’ll be canting to the right at the bar, then, later in bed, twitching to the right in their dreams.
At the corner of Houston and Chrystie, a cherry-red Denali pulls up alongside them, three overdressed women in the backseat, the driver alone up front and wearing sunglasses.
The passenger-side window glides down. “Officers, where the Howard Johnson hotel at around here . . .”
“Straight ahead three blocks on the far corner,” Lugo offers.
“Thank you.”
“What’s with the midnight shades?” Daley asks from the shotgun seat, leaning forward past Lugo to make eye contact.
“I got photosensitivity,” the guy answers, tapping his frames.
The window glides back up and he shoots east on Houston.
“Did he call us officers?”
“It’s that stupid flattop of yours.”
“It’s that fuckin’ tractor hat of yours.”
“I gots photosensitivity . . .”
A moment later they’re rolling past the Howard Johnson’s themselves, watching as the guy from the Denali makes like a coachman, holding the door for all the ladies filing out from the backseat.
“Huggy Bear,” Lugo mumbles.
“Who the fuck puts a Howard Johnson’s down here?” Scharf gestures to the seedy-looking chain hotel, its neighbors an ancient knishery and a Seventh-Day Adventist church whose aluminum cross is superimposed over a stone-carved Star of David. “What was the thinking behind that.”
“Twenty-eight flavors,” Lugo says. “My dad used to take me every Sunday after my game.”
“You’re talking the ice cream parlor,” Scharf says, “that’s different.”
“I never had a dad,” says Geohagan.
“You want one of mine?” Daley turns in his seat. “I had three.”
“I can only dream of a dad who’d take me to a Howard Johnson’s after my game.”
“Hey, Sonny.” Lugo catches Geohagan’s eye in the rearview. “Later tonight, you want to have a catch with me?”
“Sure, mister.”
“Pokey as fuck out here, huh?” says Daley.
“That’s because it’s your turn to collar,” Lugo says, waving off some drunk who thinks he’s just flagged down a taxi.
“Somebody up there hates me.”
“Hang on . . .” Scharf abruptly perks up, his head on a swivel. “That there looks good. High beams going west, four bodies.”
“Going west?” Lugo floors it in heavy traffic. “Think thin, girls,” as he takes the driver-side wheels up onto the concrete divider to get past a real cab waiting for the light, then whips into a U-turn to get abreast of the target car, peering in. “Females, two mommies, two kids,” passing them, hungrier now, all of them, then Scharf ahoying once again: “Green Honda, going east.”
“Now east, he says.” Lugo does another 180 and pulls behind the Honda.
“What do we got . . .”
“Two males in the front.”
“What do we got . . .”
“Neon trim on the plate.”
“Tinted windows.”
“Right rear taillight.”
“Front passenger just stuffed something under the seat.”
“Thank you.” Lugo hits the misery lights, climbs up the Honda’s back, the driver taking half a block to pull over.
Daley and Lugo slowly walk up on either side of the car, cross-beam the front seats.
The driver, a young green-eyed Latino, rolls down his window. “Officer, what I do?”
Lugo rests his crossed arms on the open window as if it’s a backyard fence. “License and registration, please?”
“For real, what I do?”
“You always drive like that?” His voice almost gentle.
“Like what?”
“Signaling lane changes, all road-courteous and shit.”
“Excuse me?”
“C’mon, nobody does that unless they’re nervous about something.”
“Well I was.”
“Nervous?”
“You was following me.”
“A cab was following you?”
“Yeah, OK, a cab.” Passing over his papers. “All serious, Officer, and no disrespect intended, maybe I can learn something here, but what did I do?”
“Primary, you have neon trim on your plates.”
“Hey, I didn’t put it there. This my sister’s whip.”
“Secondary, your windows are too dark.”
“I told her about that.”
“Tertiary, you crossed a solid yellow.”
“To get around a double-parked car.”
“Quadrary, you’re sitting by a hydrant.”
“That’s ’cause you just pulled me over.”
Lugo takes a moment to assess the level of mouth he’s getting.
As a rule he is soft-spoken, leaning in to the driver’s window to conversate, to explain, his expression baggy with patience, going eye to eye as if to make sure what he’s explicating here is being digested, seemingly deaf to the obligatory sputtering, the misdemeanors of verbal abuse, but . . . if the driver says that one thing, goes one word over some invisible line, then without any change of expression, without any warning signs except maybe a slow straightening up, a sad/disgusted looking off, he steps back, reaches for the door handle, and the world as they knew it, is no more.
But this kid isn’t too bad.
“This is for your own benefit. Get out of the car, please?”
As Lugo escorts the driver to the rear bumpers, Daley leans into the shotgun-seat window and tilts his chin at the passenger, this second kid sitting there affecting comatosity, heavy-lidded under a too big baseball cap and staring straight ahead as if they were still driving somewhere.
“So what’s your story?” Daley says, opening the passenger door,
offering this one some sidewalk too, as Geohagan, all tatted out in Celtic braids, knots, and crosses leans in to search the glove com-
partment, the cup caddy, the tape storage bin, Scharf taking the rear seats.
Back at the rear bumpers, the driver stands in a scarecrow T looking off soul-eyed as Lugo, squinting through his own cigarette smoke, fingerwalks his pockets, coming up with a fat roll of twenties.
“This a lot of cheddar, cuz,” counting it, then stuffing it in the kid’s shirt pocket before continuing the patdown.
“Yeah, well, that’s my college tuition money.”
“What the fuck college takes cash?” Lugo laughs, then finished, gestures to the bumper. “Have a seat.”
“Burke Technical in the Bronx? It’s new.”
“And they take cash?”
“Money’s money.”
“True dat.” Lugo shrugs, just waiting out the car search. “So what’s your major?”
“Furniture management?”
“You ever been locked up before?”
“C’mon, man, my uncle’s like a detective in the Bronx.”
“Like a detective?”
“No. A detective. He just retired.”
“Oh yeah? What precinct?”
“I don’t know per se. The Sixty-ninth?”
“The fighting Sixty-ninth,” Geohagan calls out, feeling under the passenger seat now.
“There is no Sixty-ninth,” Lugo says, flicking his butt into the gutter.
“Sixty-something. I said I wasn’t sure.”
“What’s his name.”
“Rodriguez?”
“Rodriguez in the Bronx? That narrows it down. What’s his first name?”
“Narcisso?”
“Don’t know him.”
“Had a big retirement party?”
“Sorry.”
“I been thinking of trying out for the Police Academy myself.”
“Oh yeah? That’s great.”
“Donnie.” Geohagan backs out of the passenger door, holds up a Zip-loc of weed.
“Because we need more fuckin’ smokehounds.”
The kid closes his eyes, tilts his chin to the stars, to the moon over Delancey.
“His or yours.” Lugo gestures to the other kid on the sidewalk, face still blank as a mask, his pockets strewn over the car hood. “Somebody needs to say or you both go.”
“Mine,” the driver finally mutters.
“Turn around, please?”
“Oh man, you gonna lock me up for that?”
“Hey, two seconds ago you stepped up like a man. Stay with that.”
Lugo cuffs him then turns him forward again, holding him at arm’s length as if to assess his outfit for the evening. “Anything else in there? Tell us now or we’ll rip that shitbox to shreds.”
“Damn, man, I barely had that.”
“All right then, just relax,” guiding him back down to the bumper as the search continues nonetheless.
The kid looks off, shakes his head, mutters, “Sorry ass.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nah, I’m just saying”—pursing his mouth in self-disgust—“not about you. ”
Geohagan comes back with the baggie, hands it over.
“OK, look.” Lugo lights another cigarette, takes a long first drag. “This? We could give a fuck. We’re out here on a higher calling.” He nods at a passing patrol car, something the driver said making him laugh. “You know what I’m saying?”
“More serious shit?”
“There you go.”
“That’s all I got.”
“I’m not taking about what you got. I’m talking about what you know.”
“What I know?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
They both turn and look off in the direction of the East River, two guys having a moment, one with his hands behind his back.
Finally, the kid exhales heavily. “Well, I can tell you where a weed spot is.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Lugo rears back. “I’ll tell you where a weed spot is. I’ll tell you where fifty is. I can get you better shit than this for half what you paid seven days a week with blindfolds on.”
The kid sighs, tries not to look at the barely curious locals coming out of the Banco de Ponce ATM center and the Dunkin’ Donuts, the college kids hopping in and out of taxis.
“C’mon. Do right by me, I’ll do right by you.” Lugo absently tosses the baggie from hand to hand, drops it, picks it up.
“Do right like how?”
“I want a gun.”
“A what? I don’t know a gun.”
“You don’t have to know a gun. But you know someone who knows someone, right?”
“Aw, man . . . ”
“For starters, you know who you bought this shit from, right?”
“I don’t know any guns, man. You got forty dollars a weed there. I paid for it with my own money, ’cause it helps me relax, helps me party. Everybody I know is like, go to work, go to school, get high. That’s it.”
“Huh . . . so like, there’s no one you could call, say, ‘Yo, I just got jacked in the PJs. I need me a onetime whistle, can I meet you at such and such?’ ”
“A whistle?”
Lugo makes a finger gun.
“You mean a hammer?”
“A hammer, a whistle . . . ” Lugo turns away and tightens his ponytail.
“Pfff . . .” The kid looks off, then, “I know a knife.”
Lugo laughs. “My mother has a knife.”
“This one’s used.”
“Forget it.” Then, chin-tilting to the other kid: “What about your sidekick there.”
“My cousin? He’s like half-retarded.”
“How about the other half?”
“Aw, c’mon.” The driver lolls his head like a cow.
Another patrol car rolls up, this one to pick up the prisoner.
“All right, just think about it, OK?” Lugo says. “I’ll see you back in holding in a few hours.”
“What about my car?”
“Gilbert Grape there, he’s got a license?”
“His brother does.”
“Well then tell him to call his brother and get his ass down here before you wind up towed.”
“Damn.” Then calling out: “Raymond! You hear that?”
The cousin nods but makes no move to retrieve his cell phone from the car hood.
“So you never answered my question,” Lugo says, skull-steering him into the rear of the cruiser. “You ever been locked up before?”
The kid turns his head away, murmurs something.
“It’s OK, you can tell me.”
“I said, ‘Yes.’ ”
“For?”
The kid shrugs, embarrassed, says, “This.”
“Yeah? Around here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How long back?”
“On Christmas Eve.”
“On Christmas Eve for this?” Lugo winces. “That is cold. Who the hell would . . . You remember who collared you?”
“Uh-huh,” the kid mutters, then looks Lugo in the face. “You.”
An hour later, with the kid on ice back at the Eighth, good for another hour or two’s worth of gun-wrangling, which would probably go nowhere, and a few more hours’ worth of processing for Daley, the arresting officer, Daley good and taken care of, they were out again looking to get one for Scharf, a last-call drive-around before settling on one of the local parks for an if-all-else-fails post-midnight curfew rip.
Turning south off Houston onto Ludlow for the fiftieth time that night, Daley sensed something in the chain-link shadows below Katz’s Deli, nothing he could put his finger on, but . . . “Donnie, go around.”
Lugo whipped the taxi in a four-block square: Ludlow to Stanton, to Essex, to Houston, creeping left onto Ludlow again, just past Katz’s, only to come abreast of a parked car full of slouched-down plainclothes from Borough Narcotics, the driver eyeballing them out of there: This is our fishing hole.
Excerpted from Lush Life by Richard Price. Copyright © 2008 by Richard Price. Published in March 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
