Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38939 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-04
• Released on: 2008-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374299255
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There's a crime at the heart of the story, but you don't read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they're really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Master of the Bronx and Jersey projects, Price (Clockers) turns his unrelenting eye on Manhattan's Lower East Side in this manic crescendo of a novel that explores the repercussions of a seemingly random shooting. When bartender Ike Marcus is shot to death after barhopping with friends, NYPD Det. Matty Clark and his team first focus on restaurant manager and struggling writer Eric Cash, who claims the group was accosted by would-be muggers, despite eyewitnesses saying otherwise. As Matty grills Eric on the still-hazy details of the shooting, Price steps back and follows the lives of the alleged shooters—teenagers Tristan Acevedo and Little Dap Williams, who live in a nearby housing project—as well as Ike's grieving father, Billy, who hounds the police even as leads dwindle. As the intersecting narratives hurtle toward a climax that's both expected and shocking, Price peels back the layers of his characters and the neighborhood until all is laid bare. With its perfect dialogue and attention to the smallest detail, Price's latest reminds readers why he's one of the masters of American urban crime fiction. Author tour. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

Customer Reviews

A Touch Too Lush
Although I'm fairly familiar with Price through his film and television work, and have had "The Wanderers" sitting on my bookshelf for years, I've never read one of his novels until now. Set in a post 9/11, post Gulianni, rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side, the story revolves around a mugging turned murder, and how it affects everyone invovled. The framework is more or less that of a police procedural, where we meet the muggers and perps, see it all go down, meet the police who come along to pick up the peices, and then watch them all interact over the course of the following week.

Price is widely regarded as a master of dialogue, and a master of capturing how people walk it and talk it in the real world. And he certainly does that here, conveying almost everything important via dialogue, which is often heavily spiced with street slang or on the job jargon (which some readers may find offputting). Moreover s a fan of procedurals, I was hooked from the get go by Price's ability to set up the situation, show it go down, and then maintain the seperate threads. Indeed, for the first third of the book, I was completely engrossed.

However, after around 150 pages, he story loses momentum, and the final third of the book definitely drags. A large part of this has to do with the various perspectives Price keep shifting between, and his inability to trim away the fat. While it makes sense that we spend a good deal of time with lead detective Matty, who's trying to sort through conflicting statements and witness accounts, the story isn't helped by his semi-flirtation with the relative of the victim, and a subplot invovling his own stupid kids is really unnecessary. We also spend a lot of time with Eric Cash, whose role changes from victim to suspect to witness, and is traumatized by these events. That's all fine, but do we really need subplots about his sex-worker studying girlfriend in the Phillipines, or his abortive attempt to deal coke?

Of course, Price is trying to do more than write a crime procedural, and these subplots all feed into the broader themes he's trying to explore. These are pretty fundamental at their core: what happens to us/how do we feel when we realize that our lives aren't what we had planned, or that we've somehow failed ourselves. for example, Matty is a good cop but a failed father, Eric is a good maitre'd but a failed actor. This is all well and good, but Price doesn't handle these themes with nearly the same accumen as he does his dialogue and descriptive details. It's a good read, but it gets so swamped by extraneous characters and situation that I went from loving it to merely liking it by page 450 or so.

THE AXIS OF THE WHEEL OF LIFE
(The title for this review is from "Lush Life," by Billy Strayhorn.)

Don't pick up a copy of Richard Price's "Lush Life," unless you're ready to give up your weekend. It's compulsively readable, and it's that good. It's also pretty depressing, but depressing in that, "Oh, God, that's life," way.

"Lush Life," is a police procedural that takes place over a little more than a week in the gentrified Inferno of NYC's lower east side. We meet the gentry, the old-timers, the cops, and, of course, the criminals. Nobody's clean, everybody's skimming, everybody's on the make for one thing or another, one guy gets shot in a mugging gone bad, and hell breaks loose in hell.

"Lush Life," has a lot going for it. The characters seem right, and true; the mileu is nailed; most of the pieces seem to be absolutely right-on, though I had a problem with a New Orleans style memorial service that tipped over the top; and the dialogue is so good it could have been written by Satan himself. One character seems to be the moral hinge of the novel - the father of the young man killed in the mugging. He's both pathetic, and a wraith, and he falls apart and comes back together more than once as he reaches for meaning and redemption.

Is there meaning, is there redemption? Check out the last stanza of Billy Strayhorn's incredible lyrics to the Duke Ellington tune, Lush Life:

"Romance is mush/stifling those who strive/so I'll live a lush life in some small dive/And there I'll be/While I rot with the rest/of those whose lives are lonely too..."

"The City of New York Was Not Finished With Him"
Richard Price's now-bestselling Lush Life is not as much about a specific crime as it is about New York and the inhabitants of its Lower East side: cops, bartenders, wannabe actors and screenwriters, immigrants, rich kids, broken families, drug addicts, thugs, grocery store owners, the abused, and the abusers, all of them desperate. The murder of Ike Marcus is only a flashpoint. The people that the act brings to the surface define the novel through their individual stories.

Detectives Matty and Yolanda are charged with solving Ike's murder despite the inexplicable reluctance of their superiors to support the effort. Billy Marcus, Ike's father, attracts Matty's sympathy, both as a victim and as a representative of fatherhood, a role that continues to baffle Matty as he tries to deal with his wayward sons. Eric Cash, a bartender who was with Ike when he was shot, follows a downward spiral in the wake of the murder. The shooter, a formerly good kid living in low-income housing, struggles to find some control in an otherwise helpless, and hopeless, situation. Even the more minor characters have burdens that overtake their dreams.

This ambitious novel suffers at times from meandering subplots, some of which seem completely superfluous, not even adding to the larger portrait of life downtown; however, where the structure is more focused, Price shines. Stylistically, Lush Life makes demands on its readers through its sometimes unconventional prose and multiple points-of-view that skip from character to character, subplot to subplot. The result is a memorable, though fractured, portrait of the seedy side of New York.

I recommend this complex novel for Richard Price fans, readers of literary fiction, and those who want more than the usual summer fare. Skip this if you want a suspenseful, quick-read crime novel.