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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Mr. Price's most powerful and galvanic work yet, a novel that showcases his sympathy and his street cred and all his skills as a novelist and screenwriter . . . A visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City and some of its residents, complete with soundtrack, immortalized in this dazzling prosemovie of a novel."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A big, powerful novel . . . Its real protagonist is the complicated, tragic, and endlessly fascinating American city street. . . . Outstanding."--Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)
"His prose has never felt more fluid, his plotting is spry. . . . Price's ability to capture and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and evanescent vocabulary of urban life cannot be over-praised: with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best, one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature."--Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books
"Richard Price knows how crime sounds and smells, and he knows that it’s all tied up in race and class, two big subjects all too rare in American fiction. . . . Every sentence is a pleasure."--John H. Richardson, Esquire
“Price interrogates the players--cops, perps, victims, witnesses--until each one gives up a great human truth hidden in his seedy little soul."--Time
"Lush Life is lean, moving fast, and taking in large truths with a glance. . . . It's The Bonfire of the Vanities 2.0. Though Tom Wolfe's 1987 book remains one of the essential American novels, Lush Life is, in one way, the greater achievement."--Kyle Smith, The Wall Street Journal
"An astonishing new novel . . . Price has a black belt in dialogue, with a Ph.D. in capturing the deadpan humor that helps cops stay sane. Lush Life is a serious book, with serious points to make, but it’s also a wicked pleasure to read."--Adam Woog, The Seattle Times
"Richard Price is one hell of a raconteur ... opening any of his books means getting hooked—you turn the first page on the commute back from work and next thing you know, it’s 4am and you’ve polished off both the novel and an entire bag of Milanos."--Elisabeth Vincentelli, Time Out New York
"With LUSH LIFE Richard Price has become our post-modern American Balzac. Except that he's a whole lot funnier than Balzac and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around, living or dead, American or French. He's a writer I hope my great-grandchildren will read, so they'll know what it was like to be truly alive in the early 21st century." —Russell Banks
"This is it, folks. The novel about gentrified New York, circa right now, that we’ve been waiting for. Richard Price understands what's happened to our beloved city, he writes dialogue like a genius, and he absolutely, genuinely cares. Unforgettable." —Gary Shteyngart
“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
“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 accomplishments of first-rate writing.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review, on Freedomland
Book Description
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 him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places--until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and "quality of life" squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and "quality of life" squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
About the Author
Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
The Quality of Life Task Force: four sweatshirts in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run; their mantra: Dope, guns, overtime; their motto: Everyone’s got something to lose.
“Is dead tonight.”
The four car-stops so far this evening have been washouts: three municipals—a postal inspector, a transit clerk, and a garbageman, all city employees off-limits—and one guy who did have a six-inch blade under his seat, but no spring-release.
A station wagon coming off the bridge pulls abreast of them at the Delancey Street light, the driver a tall, gray, long-nosed man sporting a tweed jacket and Cuffney cap.
“The Quiet Man,” Geohagan murmurs.
“That’ll do, pig,” Scharf adds.
Lugo, Daley, Geohagan, Scharf; Bayside, New Dorp, Freeport, Pelham Bay, all in their thirties, which, at this late hour, made them some of the oldest white men on the Lower East Side.
Forty minutes without a nibble . . .
Restless, they finally pull out to honeycomb the narrow streets for an hour of endless tight right turns: falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, crêperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement,
tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Boulangerie, bar, hat boutique, corner. Iglesia, gelateria, matzo shop, 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, Lady Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service, corner. And then finally, on a sooty stretch of Eldridge, something with potential: a weary-faced Fujianese in a thin Members Only windbreaker, cigarette hanging, plastic bags dangling from crooked fingers like full waterbuckets, trudging up the dark, narrow street followed by a limping black kid half a block behind.
“What do you think?” Lugo taking a poll via the rearview. “Hunting for his Chinaman?”
“That’s who I’d do,” Scharf says.
“Guy looks beat. Probably just finished up his week.”
“That’d be a nice score too. Payday Friday, pulled your eighty-four hours, walking home with what, four? Four fifty?”
“Could be his whole roll on him if he doesn’t use banks.”
“C’mon, kid”—the taxi lagging behind its prey, all three parties in a half-block stagger—“it doesn’t get better than this.”
“Actually, Benny Yee in Community Outreach? He says the Fooks finally know not to do that anymore, keep it all on them.”
“Yeah, OK, they don’t do that anymore.”
“Should we tell the kid? He probably hasn’t even heard of Benny Yee.”
“I don’t want to come between a young man and his dreams,” Lugo says.
“There he goes, there he goes . . .”
“Forget it, he just made us,” Daley says as the kid abruptly loses his limp and turns east, back towards the projects, or the subways, or, like them, to simply take five, then get back in the game.
Right turn after right turn after right, so many that when they finally pull someone over, and they will, it’ll take a minute to get their legs under them, to stop leaning into their steps; so many right turns that at three in the morning, six beers deep at Grouchie’s, everybody silently, angrily watching the one lucky bastard getting a lap ride in a banquette by the bathrooms, they’ll be canting to the right at the bar, then, later in bed, twitching to the right in their dreams.
At the corner of Houston and Chrystie, a cherry-red Denali pulls up alongside them, three overdressed women in the backseat, the driver alone up front and wearing sunglasses.
The passenger-side window glides down. “Officers, where the Howard Johnson hotel at around here . . .”
“Straight ahead three blocks on the far corner,” Lugo offers.
“Thank you.”
“What’s with the midnight shades?” Daley asks from the shotgun seat, leaning forward past Lugo to make eye contact.
“I got photosensitivity,” the guy answers, tapping his frames.
The window glides back up and he shoots east on Houston.
“Did he call us officers?”
“It’s that stupid flattop of yours.”
“It’s that fuckin’ tractor hat of yours.”
“I gots photosensitivity . . .”
A moment later they’re rolling past the Howard Johnson’s themselves, watching as the guy from the Denali makes like a coachman, holding the door for all the ladies filing out from the backseat.
“Huggy Bear,” Lugo mumbles.
“Who the fuck puts a Howard Johnson’s down here?” Scharf gestures to the seedy-looking chain hotel, its neighbors an ancient knishery and a Seventh-Day Adventist church whose aluminum cross is superimposed over a stone-carved Star of David. “What was the thinking behind that.”
“Twenty-eight flavors,” Lugo says. “My dad used to take me every Sunday after my game.”
“You’re talking the ice cream parlor,” Scharf says, “that’s different.”
“I never had a dad,” says Geohagan.
“You want one of mine?” Daley turns in his seat. “I had three.”
“I can only dream of a dad who’d take me to a Howard Johnson’s after my game.”
“Hey, Sonny.” Lugo catches Geohagan’s eye in the rearview. “Later tonight, you want to have a catch with me?”
“Sure, mister.”
“Pokey as fuck out here, huh?” says Daley.
“That’s because it’s your turn to collar,” Lugo says, waving off some drunk who thinks he’s just flagged down a taxi.
“Somebody up there hates me.”
“Hang on . . .” Scharf abruptly perks up, his head on a swivel. “That there looks good. High beams going west, four bodies.”
“Going west?” Lugo floors it in heavy traffic. “Think thin, girls,” as he takes the driver-side wheels up onto the concrete divider to get past a real cab waiting for the light, then whips into a U-turn to get abreast of the target car, peering in. “Females, two mommies, two kids,” passing them, hungrier now, all of them, then Scharf ahoying once again: “Green Honda, going east.”
“Now east, he says.” Lugo does another 180 and pulls behind the Honda.
“What do we got . . .”
“Two males in the front.”
“What do we got . . .”
“Neon trim on the plate.”
“Tinted windows.”
“Right rear taillight.”
“Front passenger just stuffed something under the seat.”
“Thank you.” Lugo hits the misery lights, climbs up the Honda’s back, the driver taking half a block to pull over.
Daley and Lugo slowly walk up on either side of the car, cross-beam the front seats.
The driver, a young green-eyed Latino, rolls down his window. “Officer, what I do?”
Lugo rests his crossed arms on the open window as if it’s a backyard fence. “License and registration, please?”
“For real, what I do?”
“You always drive like that?” His voice almost gentle.
“Like what?”
“Signaling lane changes, all road-courteous and shit.”
“Excuse me?”
“C’mon, nobody does that unless they’re nervous about something.”
“Well I was.”
“Nervous?”
“You was following me.”
“A cab was following you?”
“Yeah, OK, a cab.” Passing over his papers. “All serious, Officer, and no disrespect intended, maybe I can learn something here, but what did I do?”
“Primary, you have neon trim on your plates.”
“Hey, I didn’t put it there. This my sister’s whip.”
“Secondary, your windows are too dark.”
“I told her about that.”
“Tertiary, you crossed a solid yellow.”
“To get around a double-parked car.”
“Quadrary, you’re sitting by a hydrant.”
“That’s ’cause you just pulled me over.”
Lugo takes a moment to assess the level of mouth he’s getting.
As a rule he is soft-spoken, leaning in to the driver’s window to conversate, to explain, his expression baggy with patience, going eye to eye as if to make sure what he’s explicating here is being digested, seemingly deaf to the obligatory sputtering, the misdemeanors of verbal abuse, but . . . if the driver says that one thing, goes one word over some invisible line, then without any change of expression, without any warning signs except maybe a slow straightening up, a sad/disgusted looking off...
From AudioFile
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! L.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
