Recommended Reading: Clockers by Richard Price #FridayReads

A long book, and in some regards the template for THE WIRE (Price wrote for Season Five, and it shows; you'll see some dialogue that he lifted directly from CLOCKERS for his episodes); well worth the read for all of us, essentially mandatory for fans of that HBO series, though.

On the surface CLOCKERS is a gritty mystery procedural set in Jersey. A dozen pages in, and you realize it's the dark mirror of GATSBY, in that GATSBY is a slim book about a man who was really only limited by what he imagined he could be, and CLOCKERS is a long book about a species of men who are fundamentally trapped by the limits of what they can imagine themselves to be. (I.e., for better or worse, CLOCKERS argues that we're all and every one of us folks who "arise from the platonic conception of ourselves".)

That said, more deeply CLOCKERS is a really stunning exploration of what is knowable, of how we know things, and in how terribly our Beliefs will obstruct our simple capacity to observe and understand concrete Facts. The mystery at the heart of CLOCKERS is that there are no Mysteries.