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Lush Life

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 · rating details · 6,901 ratings · 1,335 reviews

"So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked

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Hardcover, 464 pages

Published March 4th 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published January 1st 2008)

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Aug 21, 2009 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: down-these-mean-streets, novels

1) Police prodecurals are not thrillers or mysteries or detective stories, they're grind-em-out painful-detail-by-painful-detail hour-by-hour no-heroes no-feel-good gloomfests. Looking at the one and two star reviews on Bookface for Lush Life, it seems perhaps people are reading Lush Life for the wrong reasons. Ain't going to be any epiphanies here, no triumph, no resolution, if the bad guys are ever caught, which is dubious, it'll probably be through some banal circumstance, some by-the-book le...more 1) Police prodecurals are not thrillers or mysteries or detective stories, they're grind-em-out painful-detail-by-painful-detail hour-by-hour no-heroes no-feel-good gloomfests. Looking at the one and two star reviews on Bookface for Lush Life, it seems perhaps people are reading Lush Life for the wrong reasons. Ain't going to be any epiphanies here, no triumph, no resolution, if the bad guys are ever caught, which is dubious, it'll probably be through some banal circumstance, some by-the-book legwork. There'll be no Holmsian brilliance but there will be middle aged guys with sizeable guts, ex-wives they can't stand, kids they never see and of course drink problems.

2) Police procedurals appear to have taken over the world of crime writing, although I don't read that much crime fiction, so I may be talking out of my left ventricle. But I'm thinking of The Wire, The Corner, Homicide the TV show (so good it hurt to watch it), Homicide the book (might be the best true crime book ever), and even back to the venerable Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. And The Sopranos was kind of a Crime Procedural. You could fill up your bathtub with gritty police procedural dirty-realism fiction, never have to leave the hood if you don't want to.

3) Richard Price is extremely good at this stuff, this is a big fat book at 455 pages but the type was so tiny it was really a 600 pager, and takes place over around eight or nine days. So : this one is slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Which is the opposite of what some people want crime fiction to be, so they will not be happy with Richard Price, they may wish to run him over with a motor mower as I did Don DeLillo when I attempted the malformed pile of hideous sentences published under the title "Underworld".

4) In this book detail is everything, detail is king, there are so many details of cop life, hood life, Lower East Side life, and each and every one could earn Mr Price some withering sarcasm and disrespect if he got it wrong, so you have to say Mr Price is very sure of himself, very. Maybe he's banking on the probability that his readers will not be the people he writes about - that's a fair assumption, I read this one in leafy ultrawhite Suffolk, England, so I can't really challenge Mr Price on the way scores of coke are made on Delancey Street or if old Chinese guys have finally learned to trust banks and not carry their entire life savings around on their person or how detectives have to plan sneaky campaigns against their bosses to get resources to investigate their bad cases. Etc.

5) Anyway, first I thought this book was a balloon that took 50 pages to get pumped up and 400 pages to gradually deflate, but after a lot of minutes spent reading Mr Price's compressed, unskimmable prose and wrestling with what every other noun actually means, and marvelling how very very few similes or metaphors he uses, in contradistinction to so many other literary writers I might mention, taking in the fact that this book dragged me in and kept me in against my will almost, being almost entirely in the company of people I would run a mile from in real life, some of the time, reading on and on and feeling like there was no oxygen in the room, all of that, still, with every caveat, with every weaselly if and but and you have to take into consideration, still, this is a fine book, and those who like this kind of stuff will find it's the kind of stuff they like.
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May 06, 2008 Jessica rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: young, attractive LES artistes with hell of money, who love the wire

Recommended to Jessica by: mom; times book review

Shelves: here-is-new-york, crime-and-punishment

Man, I am so over New York City. Seriously. I want to pack it all up and move to Berlin.... too bad I don't know any German.

Seriously, this place sucks.

That's about all I got out of this book: a heightened sense of dissatisfaction and frustration with my environment. As mentioned below, I never cared at all about any of the characters, and there didn't seem to be much of a point to the plot or anything that anyone did the whole time. I guess I mildly enjoyed it, in a bored kind of way. It was fu...more

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Nov 21, 2007 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars 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 day)....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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Sep 24, 2011 Yulia marked it as left-unfinished

Shelves: criminal-intent

Lazily written, this book may well make for a good movie one day, but it seems Price has spent too much time writing TV scripts, he's forgotten how to write prose (of course, I've not read anything else of his, so perhaps he never knew). No, lists of people, objects, sights, and neighborhoods can't substitute for atmosphere, perception, and insight. It's insulting to be given his mental scraps. I'm not starving here. I'll meet you on DVD.

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Oct 27, 2010 Mike Lindgren rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Richard Price’s novel Lush Life is a messy brawl of a crime story; diffuse, overlong, ambiguous and vexing, the book is, in short, a perfect fictional mirror for contemporary New York City. Price’s story deals with the fallout of a random murder on the Lower East Side: Two young black men from the nearby projects attempt a stickup of three barhopping hipsters, which goes awry when one of the victims resists in a burst of misplaced bravado. The ensuing investigation blows a huge hole in the lives...more Richard Price’s novel Lush Life is a messy brawl of a crime story; diffuse, overlong, ambiguous and vexing, the book is, in short, a perfect fictional mirror for contemporary New York City. Price’s story deals with the fallout of a random murder on the Lower East Side: Two young black men from the nearby projects attempt a stickup of three barhopping hipsters, which goes awry when one of the victims resists in a burst of misplaced bravado. The ensuing investigation blows a huge hole in the lives of everyone involved, from cops to families to friends to assailants.

The first third of the book, dealing with the murder and its immediate aftermath, is a tight and exhilarating piece of writing. When the leads fizzle and the investigation stalls, however, the narrative loses some of its momentum as police, witnesses and suspects settle in for an enervating waiting game. Price is a canny and observant writer — his dialogue snaps and snarls with the profane rhythms of everyday speech — and he has a pitiless sense of social geography. One sequence in particular, a depiction of a vigil organized by the dead boy’s friend, is such a cruelly accurate portrayal of the fatuousness of the young bohemians invading the neighborhood that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cringe. Price, whose most recent busman’s holiday was scriptwriting for The Wire, has a nose for the inner workings of urban life: fiction verité at its finest.

What makes Lush Life so potent a read, despite its flaws, is that it upends the tidy certainties of most crime fiction, substituting a more real and jaggedly uncertain narrative. The cops on the case are hamstrung by bureaucratic inertia; the murdered boy’s father is deranged with grief; the survivor is unhinged by guilt and resentment; and the man who pulled the trigger is not some evil psychopath but a numb, confused kid. The book’s ending implies a nearly classical fatalism about the relentless cycling of history, personal and urban. As in life, tragedies explode and fade, lives crumble and renew, and the city moves on. From The L Magazine, March 12, 2008 (less)

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Apr 20, 2008 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: borrowed-from-library, new-york, mysteries

Yet another pitch-perfect take on urban crime, policing, and city life by Richard Price. Set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan post-9/11, this story centers on the shooting death of a young white hipster who had just started working at a young white hipster restaurant in the neighborhood, and the subsequent police investigation. At first the investigation centers on one of the two other white hipster guys accompanying the victim that night, but finding the answer to what happened turns out to...more

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Oct 25, 2010 Alison rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Lush Life is a complex, gritty crime novel that also happens to be a haunting, anxious tale of gentrification, community and fatherhood, wrapped around a poison-pen love letter to the Lower East Side. Ignoring any one of those facets would miss the nuanced big picture thing that Price has going on here, but Lush Life doesn't require all that much digging and scratching on the reader's end. It's a visceral, immediate read. Don't be surprised if you can't put it down.

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Oct 11, 2011 Greg rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime-fiction, mystery

There is a scene in the middle of Lush Life where the New York Post runs a story about one of the characters, a mid-thirties LES wanna-be someone but never will be anyone (or an aging failed hipster); the story is page three, pretty prominent placement usually reserved for stories like "Jacko has gone Wacko". Within hours of this story hitting the New York Post every slimy greasy hipster of the Rivington St. area has seen this story and turns this guy into a social pariah. Wanna be actors and fi...more There is a scene in the middle of Lush Life where the New York Post runs a story about one of the characters, a mid-thirties LES wanna-be someone but never will be anyone (or an aging failed hipster); the story is page three, pretty prominent placement usually reserved for stories like "Jacko has gone Wacko". Within hours of this story hitting the New York Post every slimy greasy hipster of the Rivington St. area has seen this story and turns this guy into a social pariah. Wanna be actors and filmmakers and writers and artists, they all read this story and shun the man. I read this scene in the book and I thought I was going to get an aneurysm from the exploding yells of BULLSHIT! going on in my head. Hipsters would never read the New York Post, they wouldn't know first thing in the morning what is exclusively on page three of that rag. If you don't know what the New York Post is like or no idea of the newspapers in NYC, just trust me, no one that would be hip and living downtown or in Williamsburg or wherever else is going to be reading The Post first thing in the morning, never mind a whole neighborhood of annoyingly creative individuals.

This might have been bullshit but it was needed for the plot to move forward so I grudgingly accept it in the story and if this same scene had taken place in Baltimore I probably would have accepted it, why? Because I'm not familiar with those papers except that HL Mencken once lorded over the country's conscience while writing for one of them.

When this came out everyone seemed to be wetting themselves over this book. Maybe it was just a New York thing, but it was like this was the greatest thing ever, or so it felt like in the bookstore at the time. Maybe it was because everyone was having The Wire fever and this was a novel by one of The Wire people, but set in the Lower East Side and featured hipsters rubbing up against project kids. Maybe us New Yorkers felt like it was our own little bit of the game going on, one where us whitey's could safely stand on the sidelines and watch from that awful retro 70's living room looking bar The Johnson's or at Moby's vegan eatery in between getting some ironic tattoos and maybe slumming it at a hardcore show at ABC No Rio. Maybe we could feel like we might be from some bumfuck conservative Mid-West town but, yo, we could be hangin with Omar, dawg!

Sorry, I'm quiet annoying with this review.

Whatever.

What I'm trying to say was, everyone was creaming themselves over this book, and it was good, it was a little more involved than the usual George Pelecanos novel (which are good, I wouldn't say great but a solid good), but it wasn't nearly as good as Clockers. It was a good read but the novel never really grabbed me the way I wanted Price's story to grab me after loving Clockers so much, and I kind of felt like the hype machine surrounding this book made this out to be his best novel ever.

I did love the hipster funeral / memorial service. Price might have missed the mark on the periodical reading habits of hipsters but his portrayal of them in this scene was callously great. It made me laugh. It made me want to throw napalm onto Bedford Avenue. Good stuff.(less)

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Mar 26, 2009 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: everyone-should-read, knock-your-socks-off, good-covers, all-time-favorites

Oh man, I've been waiting to read this since it was released last year. Price at his best and a must-read for anyone with any kind of relationship to New York City. A song of the contemporary Lower East Side constructed around an essentially random murder that here is spun out (very The Wire–like) so that we meet and know the entire cast of characters: the waiter-slash-artist-slash-whatever young, vibrant, neo-bohemian, white victim; the waiter-slash-writer not-so-young, stuck, white witness; th...more

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Mar 11, 2008 Brian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2008

Lush Life by Richard Price is a really good book and it might even be a great book. It hits the pre-reqs one after another: the major players seem fully rounded people, the dialogue seems like words real folk might speak, the description of action and place verges on poetry, and the actual happenings are interesting, engaging, and worthy of the reader plowing forward, real world ignored, but the book has one failure that keeps on brewing since I read the last page.

With one exception the women ch...more Lush Life by Richard Price is a really good book and it might even be a great book. It hits the pre-reqs one after another: the major players seem fully rounded people, the dialogue seems like words real folk might speak, the description of action and place verges on poetry, and the actual happenings are interesting, engaging, and worthy of the reader plowing forward, real world ignored, but the book has one failure that keeps on brewing since I read the last page.

With one exception the women characters are defined by the male characters interaction with their vaginas. Yolanda the police detective is the only female character who manages to avoid what seems pretty much an automatic cookie cutter characterization process.

Bree the waitress, it's all about her and Eric the restaurant manager's penis.

Alessandra the ex-girlfriend, it's all about her and Eric's penis.

Minette, second wife of the victim's grieving father, it's all about her and potentially Matty the police detective's penis.

And Sarah the waitress, it's all about her seven dwarves thigh tattoo and Matty and Ike the victim and Eric and their penises.

Not to forget the nameless waitress who cries whenever Matty is banging her in the alleyway, the ex-wife of Billy the grieving husband who appears long enough for a reunion tumble in a hotel room, and to top it all off, Ike's fuck buddy who rules Ike's wake with her brazen podium delivered description of his bed technique.

Considering the estimable chops Price exhibits all over the novel the lack of a female character or characters to stand up well defined as the dudes is just weird. It’s like someone made cinnamon rolls, and damn they’re tasty, but still, the baker neglected to include the cinnamon swirls.

Maybe the oversight is ok. Price is considered literary. He’s not genre like Elmore Leonard or William Gibson, who pretty much do the same high stakes low morals tour through the urban landscape, but manage to cast female characters the equal if not the superior of their male peers in terms of definition and presence. Maybe that’s what keeps you hemmed into the genre category. Leonard and Gibson just have to make their ladies all about dick and then they’ll earn similar fawning drooling accolades.(less)

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Dec 15, 2007 Patrick Brown rated it 2 of 5 stars

I had high hopes for this book. I really only know Price's work from films (Clockers, Life Lessons (which is the first part of New York Stories)) and TV (The Wire), but I was looking forward to reading a book of his. I got a galley of this one (due out in March) and figured I'd give it a shot.

Lush Life follows several characters around the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the wake of a murder. The characters are well drawn and three dimensional, even some of the minor characters (I'm thinking of...more

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Mar 21, 2011 K.D. Oliveros rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to K.D. by: Barack Obama

Shelves: guy-lit

The two faces of New York Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia and the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf.

Eric Cash is one of those residents. He has been a bartender for 8 years and dreams of becoming an actor or a writer or a restaurateur. He has been dreaming that long – in fact for 8 years – so that he is now the oldest employee at Café Berkmann. At 32, although he is already the manager, he is bored on waiting when any of his dreams...more The two faces of New York Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia and the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf.

Eric Cash is one of those residents. He has been a bartender for 8 years and dreams of becoming an actor or a writer or a restaurateur. He has been dreaming that long – in fact for 8 years – so that he is now the oldest employee at Café Berkmann. At 32, although he is already the manager, he is bored on waiting when any of his dreams will finally happen. One of the new and young bartenders is Ike Marcus and Eric envies him for his confidence and hustle. One early morning, coming from a night of drinking, together with a friend of Ike, Eric and Ike were accosted by two muggers. Ike dies. Eric becomes the prime suspect and all he remembers are hearing Ike Marcus says “Not tonight, my man.”

What follows, and comprise the bulk of this book, is the detailed investigation of the crime by a female police officer, Yolanda and an Irish policeman, Matty Clark. I am not fond of police investigation or crime novels . I do not even watch NCIS. My problem with TV series is that I tend to like the first season because the plots are fresh and believable. But when they survive the first season, they tend to complicate their plots to the point of implausibility and ridiculousness.

One of the blurbs says that this is the new The Bonfire of the Vanities. In a way, it is true because the writing is lucid, the characters are well-developed and the prose are striking. However, the characters seem so distant that I could not emphasize with them. It might have something to do with me not having seen New York yet (I cannot picture the Lower East Side and the two types of lives there) but I guess that the situations they are in are a lot better than what we have in the Philippines. Here? A novelist cannot fill up 400 pages even if he chooses to use double space and font 12. When a homicide or whatever happens, it will be in the newspaper the following day and it will be forgotten after a week or so. There are just too many crimes that people are used to this. In fairness to our police, some crimes get resolved but some are not and forever remain as mystery.

Crime novels are nice to read. However, they are normally fast-paced and plot driven. This book is just the opposite: long, slow and prose-driven. I liked Richard Price’s use of phrases that rhyme. I liked his witty one-liners. I like sharp exchanges between the investigators and Eric. However, the long windy narratives are similar to a police investigator suddenly turned into a novelist and he just stays inside the police station tinkering with his computer the day whole trying to write a novel.

I picked this book because supposedly US President Barack Obama read this during his 2009 summer vacation.
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Dec 04, 2011 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

When it comes to the police procedural, no one is better than Richard Price, but Lush Life is his weakest novel of the last fifteen years. Billed as a culture clash between the immigrants, working poor, and project residents who live on New York's Lower East Side and the new young group of hipster posers who are moving in and pushing them out, the theme is not really that expansive. It's mainly just the story of botched robbery that ends in murder, and focuses on three characters, Eric Cash, one...more When it comes to the police procedural, no one is better than Richard Price, but Lush Life is his weakest novel of the last fifteen years. Billed as a culture clash between the immigrants, working poor, and project residents who live on New York's Lower East Side and the new young group of hipster posers who are moving in and pushing them out, the theme is not really that expansive. It's mainly just the story of botched robbery that ends in murder, and focuses on three characters, Eric Cash, one of the robbery victims, Billy Marcus, the father of the murdered man, and Matty Clark, the lead detective on the case.

It's impossible to talk too much about that plot without spoiling it because essentially, almost everything that's going to happen -- the robbery/murder and the wrong lead that effectively ends the investigation -- happens in the first third of the novel. After that it's just 300 pages of Matty Clark banging his head against a bureaucratic wall and Eric Cash and Billy Marcus falling apart, each in his own way. Part of the problem for me was that none of the characters were particularly sympathetic, and even the murder victim Ike Marcus is a posturing fool, so as a reader, I had no stake in the outcome. And weirdly for Price, he pays almost no attention to a major character, Tristan Acevedo, on whom the whole plot turns.

But what always makes a Price novel worth the time is that he gets the details exactly right. On the hilarious absurdity of tracking down a potential suspect after being given multiple tips on someone with the alias, "Steak Lips":

Matty was about to punch Steak Lips into the city database, hoping they had one in the system, otherwise they were dealing with a homegrown Steak Lips, which meant driving up to White Plains and hooking up with the local PD, getting their Steak Lips picture in order to make an array for the three callers, so that everybody was on the same page as to exactly which Steak Lips they were talking about

and on the corners of the human heart:

[e]ven though the best of all possible outcomes had been achieved here, 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.

As compared to other crime novels, 4-1/2 stars. But for a Richard Price novel: 3 stars.(less)

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Nov 22, 2008 Agreenhouse rated it 5 of 5 stars

Although I usually don't read detective novels, I had heard so much about Richard Price that I wanted to give one of his books a try. I was not disappointed. I recommend the book to those who want a fast-paced, suspenseful, suprisingly tender read. A good novel always changes how you see the world, and the main character of Officer Marty Clark has given me more respect and empathy for all NYPD detectives out there trying to solve the city's crimes. And now, for a while at least, as I wander arou...more

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Apr 22, 2008 Pglusman Glusman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Richard Price has been writing for a long time, back to The Wanderers in 1974. He was one of the primary writers on The Wire, IMHO the best series ever on tv. His new novel, Lush Life is set in the partially yuppifying, partially project world of the Lower East Side of NYC. The book is "about" a murder that happens when, with a gun pointed at him, a robbery victim informs the would-be robber, "Not tonight my man." A huge mistake. Most of the book is from the point of view of one of the cops who...more Richard Price has been writing for a long time, back to The Wanderers in 1974. He was one of the primary writers on The Wire, IMHO the best series ever on tv. His new novel, Lush Life is set in the partially yuppifying, partially project world of the Lower East Side of NYC. The book is "about" a murder that happens when, with a gun pointed at him, a robbery victim informs the would-be robber, "Not tonight my man." A huge mistake. Most of the book is from the point of view of one of the cops who is trying to find the killer, and makes mistakes. But the book delves into the lives of a companion of the victim who was too traumatized to call 911 even though he had his cell phone with him, and too ashamed to admit that to the police. He is working as a manager of an upscale restaurant-bar, thinks he should be doing something else and is stealing from the tip pool. There is a Yemeni-run grocery nearby whose freezer forms a frosted image of the virgin mary and which becomes an impromptu neighborhood shrine. There is the young man, beaten by his stepfather who does the killing (no spoiler here, you know that early on) and who has a talent for impromptu rap lyrics. There is the frustrated actor, so drunk that he fell down and saved himself during the robbery, who stages an over-the-top funeral for the victim, but it is really a pageant for him to star in. And sadly, there is the father of the victim, so blown out that he cannot face the rest of his family.

What is amazing about this is that Price has affection and respect for all of these characters. He writes about them -- all highly flawed -- and gives them full credit for their humanity. He makes their fates interesting and we care about them even though we know that they have done awful things and will continue to do awful things. The book also looks at events with an off-center but not dark sense of humor so that in otherwise inappropriate places you find yourself laughing out loud.

Much as we (or I, anyway) got involved in The Wire, I got involved in this book. I highly recommend it.(less)

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Apr 30, 2008 cheeseblab rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ultimately overcame my misgivings (though I'll probably never forget the geographical faux pas [below]) and involved me chest-deep in the story. Not original with me to point out that Price's language is brilliant precisely in its not being exactly like we've ever heard people talk, but rather like we imagine they ought to talk in hard-boiled cop stories but never quite do (except, I guess, in episodes of The Wire written by Price.

***
A pre-review, based on 40-odd pages . . .

OK, look: I didn't ge...more Ultimately overcame my misgivings (though I'll probably never forget the geographical faux pas [below]) and involved me chest-deep in the story. Not original with me to point out that Price's language is brilliant precisely in its not being exactly like we've ever heard people talk, but rather like we imagine they ought to talk in hard-boiled cop stories but never quite do (except, I guess, in episodes of The Wire written by Price.

***
A pre-review, based on 40-odd pages . . .

OK, look: I didn't get my Hagstrom street atlas out to do a gotcha. I got it out because the opening scene has such an exact sense of (Lower East Side) place that I wanted to follow along on streets with which I am vaguely but not intimately familiar.

But then we have a shooting, and we're told that (1) it takes place in front of 27 Eldridge Street, (2) the shooter immediately runs east on Delancey, and (3) the closest subway stop in that direction is at Delancey and Chrystie.

All right, how much does geographical precision matter in a work of fiction. Not much, unless . . . Unless, e.g., you've been making a big deal in interviews of how intimately you've come to know the Lower East Side. Unless, e.g., every rave review raves about the exact sense of (Lower East Side) place. In which case, get the fucking geography right, yo!

To wit: 27 Eldridge is at the intersection of Canal Street, 4 blocks south of Delancey. Now 127 Eldridge, if such an address exists, would be near Broome Street, within a block of Delancey, making it reasonable that a shooter at that location could then be seen running east on Delancey. But we have a bigger problem.

East, the shooter is said to have run. East: we're told this at least twice (once when the witness changes his story and has the shooter running south instead). And this, the cop knows, would take him to the BMT subway stop at Delancey and Chrystie. Well, yeah, if he ran almost all the way around the globe. 'Cause Chrystie is two blocks west of Eldridge.

Now, would I have known this had I not had my Hagstrom's handy? No. But would most of the quarter of a million residents of the Lower East Side, many of whom read novels, have recognized the error without access to a reference? No doubt. And are there really a quarter of a million people on the Lower East Side? I have no idea, and I haven't bothered to do the simple Wikipedia check that would confirm or disprove the estimate. 'Cause I'm not seeking good reviews on the basis of my intimate knowledge of the LES. And while it would have been easy to make that check, it's even easier to check Hagstrom or Mapquest and see that Price's geography is fucked up. Now maybe as I read further it will become a key plot point that this particular cop is a geographical fuck-up. But unless so, I gotta say: Richard, ain't no reason for this. It may be a great novel in the end, but I'm not gonna be the only one saying, "Yeah, but did you notice the screaming rearrangement of the subway system and the street grid. The fuck was that about?"(less)

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Sep 06, 2008 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

No suprise that this title is arousing the sort of genre/literary status discussions it has (eg. "good, but its just a crime novel" kind of stuff). For me, this was exactly the right book to turn to after feeling blue about the end of The Wire. As for me, I thought it was VERY good, and not unlike many of its brethren over in the mystery section in that regard. Readers who were impressed by this as a terrific social novel should consider hopping over the genre divide and checking out some of tod...more

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Apr 21, 2009 Monica rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

3.5 stars really (why is it that the only half star I insist on declaring is the 3.5? Maybe because it marks the difference between pretty enjoyable and very enjoyable? There is a step between those two for sure).

I listened to the audiobook recording which is narrated (to excellent effect) by Bobby Cannavale. Price's novel feels cinematic at every turn, which makes sense considering his history as a screenwriter and credits on The Wire. I was pretty riveted to the story and I think this may get...more

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Oct 13, 2008 Maya rated it 3 of 5 stars

For some reason I found this a way quicker read than his other stuff, maybe because the scenes were shorter. I did have a fun time thinking about this book but for me the setting did not seem as authentic as in CLOCKERS and whatever little chunk of FREEDOMLAND I got through. A lot of interesting parallels were brought up, but the follow-through wasn't as thorough as I would have liked. I thought Yolanda was the most interesting character. The edition I had basically summarized it as trying to fi...more

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Aug 18, 2008 Jamie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult, just-for-fun

I listened to this mainly because Bobby Cannavale was reading it and I love him. I quickly had one of my audiobook weaknesses - being unable to go back and re-read things. For example, a third of the way though you know who did it, you think. So I'm going, "what are we going to do for 6 more discs?) (I finally read reviews and realized the plot of the book wasn't the solving of the crime, it's the living in the aftermath. Something I could probably have discerned from the book jacket if I had mo...more

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May 07, 2010 Joseph rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Joseph by: many book critics

My rating is really 4.5 stars. This book was great.

After reading the reviews that made me pick up this book, I was expecting a novel that "transcends genres and reflects the changing landscape of the LES." Yeah...I guess it does all that...but at its core, this is simply a great detective novel. Price concentrates on just the right number of characters and his ear for dialogue is unmatched.

Not a negative, just an observation - the first 1/3 of the novel which takes place with just three charact...more

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Feb 19, 2009 Judy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Wow! This a tough,walloping, page turning,life is tough look at NYC.
I loved it and thought the writing was great.This will be a movie I am sure.

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Jun 08, 2008 Erik Simon rated it 1 of 5 stars

Here's the thing: I read this book because I'm surrounded by people who kept telling me how great Price was. But I couldn't finish it. I also tried THE SAMARITAN, and I couldn't finish that, either, and here's why: I loathe any fiction that relies so heavily on dialogue to move the story along. I hit a wall with that stuff. I want prose. But then I read Michael Chabon's review in NYRB, and he liked this book and loved some others, so I wonder if I'm just the big idiot in all of this. Oh well, ma...more

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Apr 09, 2008 Donika rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is a really good, page turning read. Particularly if you live in NY. Richard Price wrote for The Wire, and a lot of the good things about that show appear here. The authenticity of the neighborhoods and responsibility to the people represented. However, it's a bit uneven in plot, and mostly, focused on the wrong characters. The person best identified as the antagonist is not very relatable or interesting, and the people you care about are downplayed. I think the idea is that it's reali...more

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Jan 03, 2010 Nate's Bookgroup rated it 3 of 5 stars

I don't watch much crime TV. So I had no idea the author of this book is the lead writer for The Wire. I'm a little ignorant of the red tape police men and women have to cut through in order to bring a criminal to justice. The currency of information that exchanges day to day.

I liked this book.

Don't get me wrong. The jargon is hard to take. I wanted to put it down 6 or 7 times. It took about half way through for me to understand everything that was being said. The flow of the plot was staccato...more

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Mar 21, 2009 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Richard Price isn't exactly a plot-driven author. Rather than rushing the reader along from point A to point B to solve a mystery, Price wants the reader to spend time with his characters, to the point that we're crawling under their skins and learning everything we could possibly want to know about them; the good, the bad and especially the ugly. This approach can be hit or miss for Price. When immersing the reader in the underworld of drug-dealing in Clockers, it makes for a fascinating experi...more

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Mar 03, 2009 Travis rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had resisted reading anything by Price for a long long time, because I always tend to run the opposite way from recommends, especially in regards to 'New York' writers. Plus, I thought the film 'Clockers' stunk, so this was no easy sell. I'm so glad I got over myself and read this because I haven't been engulfed and utterly entranced in a book in what seems like forever. Days later, I'm still wanting it to go on, which I think is the best praise you can give a book.

The main character, more or...more

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Feb 25, 2009 Sandie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-lit

Richard Price has a reputation for possessing the unique ability to capture the pulse of New York City and it's inhabitants. In the case of Lush Life, the pulse is irratic and it appears that the patient will require life support to survive. The dialogue is hard to follow and the story itself is a bit too "realistic" for my taste.

The New York featured here is not the city of Madison Avenue and Broadway plays. This city is dirty and unforgiving, most of the characters, from cops to thugs, tend to...more

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Feb 25, 2009 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars

Not knowing anything from personal experience about the way murder investigations are run, my assessment of Richard Price's treatment of one surely lacks weight.

However, I get a very strong feeling that 'Lush Life' (as well as the rest of Price's body of work) is closer to The Way Things Really Are than any other fictional account of police work in general. Furthermore, I posit that realism, in the crime genre, is far more compelling than stories treated to have the maximum dramatic impact.

So, k...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

Richard Price deftly explores the urban world in his novels and screenwriting (Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan, **1/2 Mar/Apr 2003, and HBO's The Wire), but critics agreed that Lush Life is perhaps his finest work of social realism yet. Compared to Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities for its adept intertwining of the crime and social novel, Lush Life just might be "the greater achievement" (Wall Street Journal). While offering a panoramic view of class and social tensions in Manhattan, Price al

...more

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About Richard Price

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

A self-described "middle class Jewish kid," Price grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx. Today, he lives in New York City with his family.

Price graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967 and obtained a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from C...more Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

A self-described "middle class Jewish kid," Price grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx. Today, he lives in New York City with his family.

Price graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967 and obtained a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia. He also did graduate work at Stanford. He has taught writing at Columbia, Yale, and New York University. He was one of the first people interviewed on the NPR show Fresh Air when it began airing nationally in 1987. In 1999, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Price's novels explore late 20th century urban America in a gritty, realistic manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. Several of his novels are set in a fictional northern New Jersey city called Dempsy. In his review of Lush Life (2008), Walter Kirn compared Price to Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow.

Price's first novel was The Wanderers (1974), a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx in 1962, written when Price was 24 years old. It was adapted into a movie in 1979, with a screenplay by Rose and Philip Kaufman and directed by the latter.
Clockers (1992) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been praised for its humor, suspense, dialogue, and characterizations. In 1995, it was made into a movie directed by Spike Lee; Price and Lee shared writing credits for the screenplay.

Price has written numerous screenplays, of which the best known are The Color of Money (1986), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, Life Lessons (the Martin Scorsese segment of New York Stories) (1989), Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1992), Ransom (1996), and Shaft (2000). He also wrote for the HBO series The Wire. Price was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2009 ceremony for his work on the fifth season of The Wire. He is often cast in cameo roles in the films he writes.

Price also wrote and conceptualized the 15 minute film surrounding Michael Jackson's "Bad" video.
Additionally, he has published articles in the The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The New Yorker, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and others.(less)

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Quotes from Lush Life

“falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, creperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school. People's Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Ladi Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service corner.” — 7 people liked it

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