Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36360 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-04
• Released on: 2008-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Selling $10 bottles of cocaine to drive-by customers, clockers are at the low end of the drug-dealing chain. One step up is Strike Dunham, an ulcer-ridden, black 19-year-old who oversees his part of the operation from a bench in the housing projects of a New Jersey city called Dempsy--the bleak and confined world that screenwriter and novelist Price ( Sea of Love and The Wanderers, respectively) explores with consistent authority. The murder of another dealer in Strike's drug organization brings in middle-aged, almost burned-out homicide detective Rocco Klein, who doesn't believe it when Strike's brother Victor, a young man with a family, two jobs and a clean record, confesses to the crime. The shooter's identity and motive are the questions on which Price turns this thoroughgoing exploration of Dempsy's dark and gritty underside, a place marked by unceasing, often random, motion and by the steady closing in of horizons. At the same time, Price plumbs the remarkably parallel interior worlds of Rocco and Strike. Although neither the hard-drinking Rocco, with a wife and infant daughter, nor the solitary Strike, who downs bottle after bottle of vanilla Yoo-Hoo to soothe his stomach pain, has a drug habit, each is as addicted--Strike to power and status, Rocco to the unpredictability and risk of his job--as are the junkies both pursue. The vividly depicted Dempsy seems a Dantean hell, at once a place and a condition from which escape may be impossible. 100,000 first printing; first serial to Esquire; movie rights to Universal; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

--Washington Post Book World
"One hell of a book."

--USA Today
"An unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair."

Customer Reviews

Evolution of an Author
In a 2008 interview, Richard Price spoke of his evolution as a writer, noting that he'd learned to say more with less. That is, instead of driving home a point four times in four different ways, he'd find the single most effective way to do so, and leave it at that.

Having read CLOCKERS after Price's 2007 novel Lush Life, I can see exactly what he means. CLOCKERS is so absolutely convincing in its depiction of urban New Jersey in the 1990s, one imagines Price went on hundreds of police ride-alongs to get his research done.

That said, after a few hundred pages and umpteen instances where Strike (one of our two protagonists) clutches his stomach, I felt the urge to shake Price's editor and say, "We get it: Strike has an ulcer!" This isn't to diminish the novel's power; among other things, it features a crime boss named Rodney, who must be the most fascinating literary villain I've run across since Iago.

CLOCKERS is the rare crime novel that is more successful as literature than it is as a mystery. For a book built around the question of who murdered whom, the answer is a red herring. But as a vivid and muscular account of the big city's underbelly, this is one heck of a book.

Highly recommended.

Too heavy for me
This was just too heavy for me. I struggled through half the book before giving up. It is very realistic and saddening but too much detail on every page. I just could not get involved in it, could not sympathise with any characters nor force myself to continue to the end.

Exceptional
Beyond brilliant, there is no American writer living or dead who has such perfect pitch, an ear for the language which is infallible. Add that to little details, like real and interesting characters and story, and you better believe Price is the best. He can make you cry.