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Lush Life: A Novel description Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. ... review details |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | A Lush Slice of Life Carved from New York City's Historic Lower East Side |
| If one of a novelist's goals is to create a milieu - a sense of place, of sights and sounds and smells - that is palpable despite being built from mere words on a page, then Richard Price has unquestionably achieved that goal in LUSH LIFE. He gets everything right - the restaurant scene, the Lower East Side street scene, the grungy, grimy police station scene, the roving, late night Quality of Life police task force scene. Add to this atmosphere a street murder and a core set of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse characters who orbit and occasionally intersect one another's lives and you have a bravura literary performance. Or to put it simply, I could not put this book down from the moment I started reading. For someone who has lived and worked around NYC for well over thirty years, LUSH LIFE read and felt like a walk along those same Lower East Side streets, in all their rough and tumble grittiness. I recognized and felt transported at the same time.
LUSH LIFE could loosely be labeled a mystery novel without a mystery. At the novel's outset, Price describes a late-night sidewalk robbery gone wrong that takes place on New York City's Lower East Side, at the amorphous intersection of black and Hispanic housing projects, the wildly expanded reaches of Chinatown, and the gentrifying fringe areas dominated by college-educated whites and a blossoming club scene. Eric Cash, an assistant restaurant manager at CafA Berkmann a popular Lower East Side eatery is helping the new bartender, Ike Marcus, deliver Ike's drunken friend Steven Boulware to his Eldridge Street apartment when they are confronted by two young men just one door from Boulware's home. Eric meekly hands over his wallet, eyes glued to the sidewalk, but Ike steps forward. "Not tonight, my man," he utters with a smile just before he is shot and killed. Price reveals the perpetrators in the earliest pages - a mostly truant high schooler named Tristan Acevedo and an older Arvin "Little Dap" Williams - along with their reason for staging the robbery. The vast majority of the book proceeds to trace the efforts of two detectives, Matty Clark and Yolanda Bello, to solve the crime and hopefully arrest the shooter. Yet in reality, the true subject of LUSH LIFE is the effect Ike Marcus's death has on everyone involved, from Eric Cash and Steven Boulware to Ike's father Billy, stepmother Minette and stepsister Nina, from Matty and the ultra-empathetic Yolanda to Tristan and his family. Everyone suffers the consequences of their actions that night or in the immediate aftermath, and for some, their past sins are also revisited upon them to amplify their punishment. Only Boulware, whose drunken stupor precipitated the events, appears impervious to the consequences, but Price sends him up as the most shamelessly "Bonfire-ish" of all his characters. In a strange and perhaps unintentional way, LUSH LIFE offers up a fictional apologia for the "quality of life" law enforcement approach so enthusiastically promoted by former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Yet at the end of 450 highly readable pages dominated by dialogue over a single robbery/murder, Richard Price also reminds us that there will be another one tonight or tomorrow and the process will begin all over again with another victim, another set of suspects and perps, and another set of families forced to absorb the collateral damage. What Richard Price has fashioned in LUSH LIFE is a toned down, more realistic version of BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Unlike Tom Wolfe's, Price's characters are not blatant caricatures, nor is pyrotechnic social satire Price's main objective. For his efforts, Richard Price has achieved a work that accurately captures the sights, sounds, and character of a richly historic but often-overlooked section of Manhattan. He has also portrayed spot on a neighborhood gentrification scenario - with its associated infusion of young, moneyed artistes and professionals and pushing out of the minorities and elderly who live there - that has played out repeatedly in New York City and still does today in Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Prospect Park, Bedford Stuyvesant, and many other areas. In doing so, Mr. Price has put the inevitable cultural, racial, and economic tensions of this process under a high-power, highly revealing microscope. LUSH LIFE is a stunningly effective work in every respect. |
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