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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1862295.Lush_Life?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Lush Life" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189374634m/1862295.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1862295.Lush_Life?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Lush Life</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16481.Richard_Price">Richard Price</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21833674?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 2 of 5 stars<br/>I found this book impressive but annoying. Price works hard—like the best of journalists figuring out exactly the texture of life inside the precinct, inside the coke-y high-end fab hip restaurant, even among the “ghetto kids” (*—more on this in a sec) for this Loisaida panorama circa 2004. So good for him—go write Random Family (Adrienne Nicole leBlanc on the South Bronx, ten million times better cause the whole thing is real, nonfiction.) Anyway that’s just a quibble, because for a novelist, Price did his homework and then some. This comes through especially in the language. It is, 80 percent of the time, taut and inventive, bled of extra words. But the fact that the other twenty percent of the time he writes with canned wording and clichéd turns of phrase suggests to me he has no ear but, rather, repeats the fresh lingo expertly. However, when at a loss (“left to his own devices,” as a canned phrase-ster would have it), he comes up with things he probably heard on TV. I am, thus, convinced Price has no imagination, though I haven’t read his other work. Maybe he just lost his imagination for this book. That accounts for the completely formula plot and, as to the above (*), awful character portrayals of the kids “in the ‘hood.” The villain, for instance, a rough named Tristan, has no real motive for killing except being dumb and egotistical. That said, I thought Price did a good job of drawing the other characters—Eric, the loser/restaurant-worker/hipster; Marty, the cop; Billy, the victim’s father. So he can do white men, and go for it, I got involved in their pathologies. But the portrayal of the Projects kids was insulting to me and to them, me because it insulted my intelligence and them because they were stereotypes who, in spite of an attempt (“motivation for killing is character’s lifelong sense of worthlessness”), had no depth or reality. In other words they were like Jaws, or Freddy—crazy, maniacal, villains killing for no reason you or I would be able to identify with aka an insane or animal-like consciousness. This was not Dick and Perry (In Cold Blood). Anyway the book is a good example of how to use research in fiction—the grittiness of the setting comes through because it’s original and detailed—you imagine Price there with his notepad every time someone steps into the elevator at the Precinct house or in the Projects—and you never feel things are being defined for you pedantically. Tom Wolfe would be proud, for better or for worse.  
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/66384?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Elizabeth's review
rating:

I found this book impressive but annoying. Price works hard—like the best of journalists figuring out exactly the texture of life inside the precinct, inside the coke-y high-end fab hip restaurant, even among the “ghetto kids” (*—more on this in a sec) for this Loisaida panorama circa 2004. So good for him—go write Random Family (Adrienne Nicole leBlanc on the South Bronx, ten million times better cause the whole thing is real, nonfiction.) Anyway that’s just a quibble, because for a novelist, Price did his homework and then some. This comes through especially in the language. It is, 80 percent of the time, taut and inventive, bled of extra words. But the fact that the other twenty percent of the time he writes with canned wording and clichéd turns of phrase suggests to me he has no ear but, rather, repeats the fresh lingo expertly. However, when at a loss (“left to his own devices,” as a canned phrase-ster would have it), he comes up with things he probably heard on T...more I found this book impressive but annoying. Price works hard—like the best of journalists figuring out exactly the texture of life inside the precinct, inside the coke-y high-end fab hip restaurant, even among the “ghetto kids” (*—more on this in a sec) for this Loisaida panorama circa 2004. So good for him—go write Random Family (Adrienne Nicole leBlanc on the South Bronx, ten million times better cause the whole thing is real, nonfiction.) Anyway that’s just a quibble, because for a novelist, Price did his homework and then some. This comes through especially in the language. It is, 80 percent of the time, taut and inventive, bled of extra words. But the fact that the other twenty percent of the time he writes with canned wording and clichéd turns of phrase suggests to me he has no ear but, rather, repeats the fresh lingo expertly. However, when at a loss (“left to his own devices,” as a canned phrase-ster would have it), he comes up with things he probably heard on TV. I am, thus, convinced Price has no imagination, though I haven’t read his other work. Maybe he just lost his imagination for this book. That accounts for the completely formula plot and, as to the above (*), awful character portrayals of the kids “in the ‘hood.” The villain, for instance, a rough named Tristan, has no real motive for killing except being dumb and egotistical. That said, I thought Price did a good job of drawing the other characters—Eric, the loser/restaurant-worker/hipster; Marty, the cop; Billy, the victim’s father. So he can do white men, and go for it, I got involved in their pathologies. But the portrayal of the Projects kids was insulting to me and to them, me because it insulted my intelligence and them because they were stereotypes who, in spite of an attempt (“motivation for killing is character’s lifelong sense of worthlessness”), had no depth or reality. In other words they were like Jaws, or Freddy—crazy, maniacal, villains killing for no reason you or I would be able to identify with aka an insane or animal-like consciousness. This was not Dick and Perry (In Cold Blood). Anyway the book is a good example of how to use research in fiction—the grittiness of the setting comes through because it’s original and detailed—you imagine Price there with his notepad every time someone steps into the elevator at the Precinct house or in the Projects—and you never feel things are being defined for you pedantically. Tom Wolfe would be proud, for better or for worse. ...less

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