Goodreads | Lush Life

Mike rated it:

11/21/07

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: fans of The Wire, of great social novels, of crime fiction

Just got this, and zipped through the prologue before crashing out last evening, and--well, it's Price, which means it's priceless. More soon, but I've been afflicted of late by too much interference with my reading life and too many half-hearted stabs at too many half-decent books. I seem to have started thirty-seven things, and the half-eaten remains litter my side of the bed. I'm really jazzed for the Price (and, Thanksgiving on the horizon, may have the time to read more than 7 pages a da...more Just got this, and zipped through the prologue before crashing out last evening, and--well, it's Price, which means it's priceless. More soon, but I've been afflicted of late by too much interference with my reading life and too many half-hearted stabs at too many half-decent books. I seem to have started thirty-seven things, and the half-eaten remains litter my side of the bed. I'm really jazzed for the Price (and, Thanksgiving on the horizon, may have the time to read more than 7 pages a day).

And just finished. First, there are bound to be reviews starting (maybe even concluding) with one complaint: this novel recalls Price's last three so very much that it may--if you're not paying attention? or maybe just not looking past the familiar--seem like a cover version of _Clockers_ and a retread of favored concerns, milieus, methods. And I'll admit: it opens sort of like a mystery, quickly drawing us a sense of the agents and targets, walking right up to a crime, then--the event itself an open question waiting for answers--we spend the next four hundred pages finding out what really went down and (Price's astonishing precise talent) watching the deep consequences of crime reveal the shape of general American and specific individual and community pathologies.

Okay, fair cop--that's those other books, too. But, damn, this is like a master class in teasing out the devastation visible behind and through one, small, meaningless act of violence. The book reads like a police procedural, taking place over a couple short weeks (plus coda), and I rushed headlong wondering what next, tension ratcheting up. But, really--what was the mystery? There was no real sense of who, or even why, done it; further, the conclusions, while nothing like pat, never really seem in doubt. Yet such mystery--each scene a revelation of character. Price is about the most observant, generous, clear-eyed chronicler of how people fuck up working in American writing today. And the suspense is the sick tense worry of how people are going to fuck up yet again, and again.

'Cause you care--deeply--about these people. Like "The Wire," for which he now writes an episode or two and which (according to its creator David Simon) owes its very existence a huge debt to Price's work on _Clockers_, we get a mass of information about how people actually work in (and against) the institutions of law enforcement, how class collisions underpin the American city. But unlike the show--which I love, which is the best damn television show ever made--Price cares a lot more about these people than the systems; drawing out a vision of the context more carefully underscores his compassionate attention to being stuck, to trying to do what you can.

But enough of content? The man can sing. At a wake for the novel's victim, one paragraph is one sentence ducking and weaving to rhythmic perfection a vision of the city: "The musicians and the mourners wended their way past the city rigs, the firemen and garbagemen impassively leaning against the cabs, then began to coil around the effigy [a ritual straw figure of the deceased] until they had created a ring of people six candles deep, the mostly ethnic locals, many with small children straddling their necks, making up an irregular seventh ring, the traffic cops just now starting to catch up once the outer blockades were lifted an even more amorphous eighth."

And so on. Really great, great book.
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Rick rated it:

03/22/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in March, 2008

Price’s latest novel is like his two previous ones, Freedomland and Clockers, rooted in a real news story, but not a shallow “Law & Order” fictionalization of it, but something deeper and richer. Also, like the two previous novels, it is a genre stretching police procedural. Set in the Lower East Side in contemporary times, Lush Life follows the human consequences of a late night street crime—three young writers/actors, one too drunk to stand by himself, are coming home after a long ...more Price’s latest novel is like his two previous ones, Freedomland and Clockers, rooted in a real news story, but not a shallow “Law & Order” fictionalization of it, but something deeper and richer. Also, like the two previous novels, it is a genre stretching police procedural. Set in the Lower East Side in contemporary times, Lush Life follows the human consequences of a late night street crime—three young writers/actors, one too drunk to stand by himself, are coming home after a long night of drinking that followed their shifts as waiters and bartenders in the newly trendy Lower East Side nightlife. Two street hoods from a neighboring project confront the trio. One, a novice mugger, has a gun that he brandishes. One of the three steps forward and says, “Not tonight my man.” The stepping forward results in a nervous, reflexive pull of a trigger and the young man falls dead. The two muggers flee. A couple of witnesses see the aftermath and mistake what they saw for what happened, confusing the work of the police and what follows in Price’s expert, street smart, and sharp, authentic dialogue is all the knotty, traumatic, flailing away at the truth and slippery recovery of shattered lives—those shattered that night and those shattered long before only to have the night’s events and consequences represent a further kicking about of the shards. Matty Clark and Yolanda Bello are the two primary police assigned to the case. Clark, the vic’s father, Eric Cash, one of the surviving victims, and Tristan, the shooter, are the book’s main characters, though there are a slew of secondary characters who, like Yolanda, share the book’s stage and come authentically to life. As does the transitioning Lower East Side. Price is generally cited as one of our best writers of dialogue (better than David Mamet or Elmore Leonard says one commentator) and there are few false notes here. Price puts words in the mouths of his story’s people that have the signature finger prints of character and personal history all over them. This is how particular cops talk to other particular cops, and how they play witnesses and suspects, and how witnesses and suspects talk back to cops, and how particular bosses talk to those they have authority over, and how husbands and wives talk, friends and lovers, bartenders and customers, the lonely and desperate to others at the end of a troubled night. It’s as real as overheard conversation; sharp as life’s disappointments and giddy as its thrills. Yet, authenticity aside, the book is oddly unsatisfying, just true to life. Things seem fated, not decided by people’s choices. Clark’s kids are no good, at least his oldest, an upstate cop who deals drugs on the side. Eric’s life has slipped away from him and it’s only recognition of that fact that seems possible. Tristan’s went off the rails at birth. Billy Marcus, the vic’s father, and his wife are in a kind of limbo that tragedy only deepens. He becomes Clark’s unwanted partner in working the crime and she a potential romantic interest. All of this is real and, one would think, ripe for more. Instead, as one of the characters might (but doesn’t) say, it is what is and it begins and ends that way....less

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