- Audio CD
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio; Unabridged edition (Mar 4 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1427203202
- ISBN-13: 978-1427203205
- Product Dimensions: 15 x 13 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product Details |
Product Description
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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
Praise for Bobby Cannavale:
"Bobby Cannavale gives an incredible performance, getting every nuance of vibrant, varied New York speak right, even flawless, rapid-fire Puerto Rican Spanish. He takes a page of print and makes it three-dimensional..."—BookPage on Lush Life
"Bobby Cannavale gives an incredible performance, getting every nuance of vibrant, varied New York speak right, even flawless, rapid-fire Puerto Rican Spanish. He takes a page of print and makes it three-dimensional..."—BookPage on Lush Life
"With a perfect ear for dialogue, Bobby Cannavale sounds like he grew up on the same patch of New York's Lower East Side that Price so effectively captures….As Clark, Cannavale adds just the right mixture of weariness and frustration. He adds dimension and surprisingly subtle touches to all of Price's already rich characters…Better yet, Cannavale delivers Price's sometimes mind-boggling slanguages (including cop-speak, Ebonics and a sort of restaurateur rap) as smoothly, effortlessly and clearly as an expertly trained Old Vic thespian interprets lines from the Bard." - Publishers Weekly, starred review
"I had the rare treat...to read and listen to Lush Life, Richard Price's glowingly acclaimed new novel. And, admitted audiophile though I am, I really think the audio is better. Bobby Cannavale gives an incredible performance, getting every nuance of vibrant, even flawless, rapid-fire Puerto Rican Spanish. He takes a page of print and makes it three-dimensional..."
- Sukey Howard, Sukey's Favorite, BookPage
"Price's latest novel is a tale of two men going in completely different directions in their respective lives who are ultimately united after a single late-night incident. The story is wonderfully realized by narrator Bobby Cannavale. The reading is the stuff that makes audiobooks so wonderful: impassioned, authentic, and true. Cannavale's throaty New York accent brings these characters to life in a way that will make listeners feel nosy just by listening. Cannavale understands the complicated psychological narrative that Price has penned and never fails to captivate his listener through the mounting tension that builds from the very start. This reading is a remarkable performance that grips the audience and brings them into Eric and Ike's dark world. Fantastic!
—AudioFile on Lush Life, Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
—AudioFile on Lush Life, Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
"Reader Bobby Cannavale does an excellent job translating the tale from print to the spoken word, bringing the many characters to life. One of the better audiobooks produced recently, it is highly recommended for all audio collections." - Library Journal, starred review
Praise for Richard Price:
"Price is a master observer and chronicler of urban grit bracketed by the culture of crime and the culture of cops. The novel is structured as a police procedural...But Price gives it the depth of fine fiction driven by his amazing talent for dialogue, for capturing the cadences of the street and the more subtle cadences of fear, bravado, sorrow and shame."—BookPage on the audiobook of Lush Life
"Price is a master observer and chronicler of urban grit bracketed by the culture of crime and the culture of cops. The novel is structured as a police procedural...But Price gives it the depth of fine fiction driven by his amazing talent for dialogue, for capturing the cadences of the street and the more subtle cadences of fear, bravado, sorrow and shame."—BookPage on the audiobook of Lush Life
“Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced. Wry, profane, hilarious, and tragic, sometimes in a single line, Lush Life is his masterwork. I doubt anyone will write a novel this good for a long, long time.”
—Dennis Lehane on Lush Life
“Price writes with the slightly manic desperation of someone determined to tell the
absolute truth...This heightened, anxious awareness of moral and psychological
complexity is one of the great accomplishments of first-rate writing.”
—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review on Freedomland
“Perhaps we are no longer used to novelists who are superb reporters...[Price’s] characters come alive in a few paragraphs and remain living presences after they depart.”
—Charles Taylor, Salon on Samaritan
—Dennis Lehane on Lush Life
“Price writes with the slightly manic desperation of someone determined to tell the
absolute truth...This heightened, anxious awareness of moral and psychological
complexity is one of the great accomplishments of first-rate writing.”
—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review on Freedomland
“Perhaps we are no longer used to novelists who are superb reporters...[Price’s] characters come alive in a few paragraphs and remain living presences after they depart.”
—Charles Taylor, Salon on Samaritan
"Narrator Bobby Canavale does a superb job of capturing all the nuances - the foreign accents, the gritty street slang, and the overall New Yorker rhythm and vibe. The audio production values are fantastic, the sound crisp and clear, making for a very pleasurable listening experience." - Curledup.com
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
What if doesn't quite match a feeling for what is,
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This review is from: Lush Life (Hardcover)
Rarely are regular middle class Americans confronted with the violence the "Black and/or Hispanic" underclass must face everyday. This is the essence of Lush Life, a sophisticated `what if' story which starts with three young white men, all aspiring to a life in the theatre but working in restaurants. When they are held at gun point by two "Black and/or Hispanic" men, one refuses to hand over his wallet and is subsequently shot. The plot follows one of the surviving white young men, the distraught and angry father and a semi-detached investigator. The story begins as plot and character driven and after about a hundred pages moves to an angst driven character study I'm used to reading in a Richard Ford novel. I just never got the visceral feeling that the story was true the way I got from Clockers and the recent spin-off television series, "The Wire." Lush Life struck me more as a sophisticated "what if" story. What if a good looking white middle class male was gunned down in the streets and his family had to cope with an event would seem quite ordinary to "Black and/or Hispanic" families growing up in the projects in large American cities? It's an interesting but not filled with the visceral truth of his previous novel.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.7 out of 5 stars (228 customer reviews) 181 of 200 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Touch Too Lush,
By A. Ross - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Lush Life (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
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. 44 of 47 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE AXIS OF THE WHEEL OF LIFE,
By Richard Wells - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Lush Life (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
(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..." 30 of 32 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The City of New York Was Not Finished With Him",
By Debbie Lee Wesselmann - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Lush Life (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
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. |
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