If you’re a fan of Richard Price’s writing from the TV show The Wire, Lush Life will satisfy the void left by the series’ end. In his eighth novel Price trails a murder in New York, using Wire-esque narrative arcs to unravel the layers of life on the street. The characters are multi-dimensional and the dialogue carries the novel. Price’s ear is true as is his empathy for desperate people.
The novel centers on the murder of a young man who stood up to some muggers and how two detectives work the case. Price then spirals outward to include the back stories of the victim, his friends and family, the shooters, the cops, and others affected by the late-night slaying.
Though primarily a plot-driven novel, the heart of this story is really the setting and the world of the lower East side of New York that Price takes into. In The New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon said,
The classic Price dyad of chief characters is represented in Lush Life by the Lower East Side itself, its authentically grungy streetscape of immigrants and poor people (Asian, Latino, and black) alternating like a point of view, block by block rather than chapter by chapter, with the new overlay of high-rise “add on” condos, fashionable shops and nightspots, and realer-than-real themed restaurants like Café Berkmann, all distressed finish and spotless tile, where Eric works as a manager.
Walter Kirn also tries to capture the essence of Price in the NYT:
Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the Masonic keystone of his novel is a box-shaped N.Y.P.D. office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn’t just present a slice of life, he piles life high and deep. Time too. The past is rendered mostly as an absence, though, as a set of caverns, a hive of catacombs. Some of his characters’ ancestors are down there, but the main way we know this is through the hollowness of the new neighborhood built over their crypts.
As an exploration of place and time the novel soars. As an exploration of urban life that turns stereotypes and cliches inside-out the novel excels. It also hammers home the vibrant multi-cultural world and its tensions. Price doesn’t really reach beyond this in terms of theme, but the novel isn’t any less for it. He doesn’t over-weight dialogue or use it falsely; he lets the characters respond and react honestly.
The only quibble I have is with the way we follow the murderers. It robs some of the tension in scenes since we know more than the characters do, but at times it’s worth it as the shooter once bumps into the victim’s sister. Price creates so many worlds and as they intersect the book really takes off.
- For a good analysis of Price’s writing style and some examples of the excellent dialogue, read The Mookse and the Gripes review here.
- Price discusses Lush Life on Charlie Rose here.
No comments:
Post a Comment