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Price has perfect ear for cops, residents of Manhattan in powerful 'Lush Life'
By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
Published on Sunday, Mar 23, 2008
No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price — not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase. Not only does Price have perfect pitch for the lingo, the rhythms and the inflections of how people talk, but he also knows how to use a line or two or even a single phrase to conjure a character's history and emotional vibe. He's as adept as Tom Wolfe at using his journalistic eye for social detail — for how people juggle work and love and money, and navigate the confounding maze of class and social status — but he does so without turning his characters, as Wolfe so often does, into caricatures or cartoons.
In his latest novel, Lush Life, Price puts his myriad gifts together to create his 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: his gritty-lyrical prose, his cinematic sense of pacing, his uncanny knowledge of the nooks and crannies of his characters' hearts. Lush Life is a novel that gives us a wide, 3-D Imax portrait of a small corner of New York City, a novel that captures Manhattan's magnetic appeal to dreamers and drifters, and its ability to crush the weak and unlucky and turn their dreams into disappointment and rage.
At its most basic level, Lush Life is a police procedural, and it possesses all the gut-level suspense of a detective story. But like The Wire, the recently concluded, highly acclaimed HBO series about cops and drug dealers (which Price wrote for), it transcends the episodic formula of shows like CSI and Law & Order.
While Lush Life does indeed begin with a murder and ends, more or less, with the arrest and confession of the gunman, its narrative bleeds out way beyond the boundaries of this crime, showing the consequences the killing has on the lives of everyone involved, from the victim's family to the investigating cops, from assorted witnesses and suspects to the actual perp himself. It unfolds slowly to show the collision of cultures — between cops and civilians, aspiring artists, blue-collar wage slaves and homeboys from the housing projects — that exists in this ''Candyland of a neighborhood,'' even as it delineates the ambitions and resentments and familial calamities shared by characters whose lives converge through the most random of events.
What happens late one night (well, early one morning) is this: Eric Cash, a restaurant manager and wannabe writer, and his new bartender, Ike Marcus, who looks like a ''poster boy for the neighborhood,'' are walking Ike's very drunken friend, Steven Boulware, home from a night of barhopping, when suddenly a shot is fired, and Ike lies dead in the street. Eric tells the investigating cop, Matty Clark, that two black or Hispanic guys came up to them, demanded they ''give it up,'' and that when Ike refused (''You picked the wrong guy''), one of the muggers shot him and took off.
There are holes in Eric's story, however — he didn't call 911 on his cell phone, as he claimed, for instance — and two ''eyewits'' say they never saw any muggers. What's more, Eric seems to have had an irrational grudge against Ike since the moment they met. With his casual confidence and dreams of artistic success, the young bartender makes the 35-year-old Eric overly conscious of how his own life has stalled, how he is still working at a restaurant after so many years with nothing to show for it all but an unfinished screenplay.
By cutting back and forth between points of view, Price gives us a kaleidoscopic perspective on Ike's murder, on the corner of the Lower East Side they all inhabit, and on the larger world of New York that bears down upon them all.
He shows us Matty dealing with the frustrations of police bureaucracy and problems at home with his wayward sons, as he tries to find Ike's killer and calm down Ike's increasingly hysterical father. He shows us Tristan, a wannabe gangster and rap poet who's stuck in an abusive home, minding his little siblings (the ''hamsters,'' as he calls them), when he wants to be out on the streets, flashing his new .22 and playing the role of a proud ''do-anything soldier.'' And he shows us Eric, pushed by Ike's murder into even further depths of narcissistic self-pity, a self-dramatizing artiste whose thwarted ambitions have metastasized into an ugly blend of pretension and self-loathing.
The hard, daily slog of police work, made up not of highlight-reel discoveries and arrests, but of the grinding, old-school, shoe-leather following of leads; the glitter, aspirational energy and spiritual emptiness of the world of swank bars and trendy restaurants; the narrow, unforgiving routine of life in the projects, where drug-dealing seems like one of the few ways out — all these disparate worlds are captured by Price here with a pitch-perfect blend of swagger and compassion.
He knows how these tectonic plates slide and crash up against one another, and he also knows how the six degrees of separation between his characters can instantly collapse into one, when a random act of violence or kindness brings players from these worlds together. He depicts his characters' daily lives with such energy, such nuance and such keen psychological radar that he makes it all come alive to the reader — a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City and some of its residents, complete with soundtrack, immortalized in this dazzling prose movie of a novel.
No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price — not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase. Not only does Price have perfect pitch for the lingo, the rhythms and the inflections of how people talk, but he also knows how to use a line or two or even a single phrase to conjure a character's history and emotional vibe. He's as adept as Tom Wolfe at using his journalistic eye for social detail — for how people juggle work and love and money, and navigate the confounding maze of class and social status — but he does so without turning his characters, as Wolfe so often does, into caricatures or cartoons.
Get the full article here.
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