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| Lush Life: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  144 reviews
Sales Rank: 751
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.6
ISBN: 0374299250
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374299255
ASIN: 0374299250
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
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Amazon.com
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. There's a crime at the heart of the story, but you don't read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they're really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. --Tom Nissley
Product 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).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 139 more reviews...
A Touch Too Lush November 14, 2007
87 out of 99 found this review helpful
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.
 A little too much style, a little too little substance November 25, 2007
44 out of 58 found this review helpful
It is my belief that when you watch a movie, the best acting comes when you don't notice that the person is acting; you become absorbed in the film and forget that the actor is merely playing a part. Similarly, often the best fiction writing is when you don't really notice the writing; if the narrative is too cleverly written, you might admire the cleverness, but it breaks the spell of being in that fictional world. Which brings me to Richard Price, and more particularly his new novel, Lush Life: it is sometimes a little too stylish for its own good.
The plot of Lush Life centers on an apparent mugging gone wrong. Eric Cash, Ike Marcus and Steve Boulware are walking around late one evening when a pair of wannabe crooks try to rob them. Ike is a little too defiant and gets shot. Steve is out cold, dead drunk and a series of events lead the police to believe Eric is the killer. It is sorted out relatively quickly, but not soon enough to for Eric to avoid a tough interrogation and a few hours in jail.
Lush Life is a crime story, but not the typical sort. It focuses less on the hunt for a murderer and more on the repercussions on all involved. For Eric, the brief arrest is merely the culmination of a very bad evening and the trauma - including dealing with his own cowardice during the mugging - will lead him on a self-destructive path. Similarly, Ike's father, Billy, is unable to cope with the loss of his son. The third principal character, Detective Matty Clark, tries to find the real killer despite an unwillingness by the police brass to really pursue the case (after the embarrassment of Eric's wrongful arrest, they'd like the whole thing to go away). Matty also has to deal with the increasingly unhinged Billy while confronting the effects of his own poor parenting techniques.
There's a lot that's good about Lush Life. There are times when it is compelling reading, and Price often has a good sense of dialogue. On the other hand, there were times when his gritty, streetwise style is a little over-the-top and is distracting; in short, I noticed he was writing rather than just being drawn into his story. Overall, this merits a high three stars; it is a decent book, but there are better ones out there.
 FADE TO BLACK December 26, 2007
23 out of 26 found this review helpful
Richard Price has a reputation for possessing the unique ability to capture the pulse of New York City and it's inhabitants. In the case of Lush Life, the pulse is irratic and it appears that the patient will require life support to survive. The dialogue is hard to follow and the story itself is a bit too "realistic" for my taste.
The New York featured here is not the city of Madison Avenue and Broadway plays. This city is dirty and unforgiving, most of the characters, from cops to thugs, tend to be the failures of society who lack any sort of moral compass (but, of course, we are urged to cut them a little slack since their shortcomings are due to unfulfilled dreams and circumstances over which they have no control). Situations are not "lush" and the "life" we observe is little more than just mere existence. This is just a little too "front page news" for me. There is the same lack of accountability for ones actions that we observe on a daily basis as we read our daily newspaper or catch the evening news. The news is depressing.......and so is this novel.
Frenetic and passionate, Price is not for every reader November 7, 2007
17 out of 22 found this review helpful
Richard Price stands among that unusual collection of period writers whose period is right now; its one that his style matches beautifully. As with his previous works, Price writes with an energy that often bounces from frenetic to manic, high octane sentences most often delivered in the form of dialogue. Indeed, Lush Life again demonstrates why many young writers look to Price's example in their efforts to master dialogue. Huge amounts of information, both of characters, plot, and context arrive in the form of rapid fire verbal banter, creating a sort of amphetamine driven tale. To be clear, that is not meant to imply, Price is not a careful writer - far from it - this instead is a highly intentional effect. That said, this style leads to a novel that will not suit every readers taste; while enjoying Lush Life, I often found its better than 400 pages exhausting.
Readers with a taste for Price, however, will surely be impressed. Lush Life offers a view of New York both compelling and familiar, in language often raw and fierce, and always with a generous dollop of humor. For those long curious in Price but who have not yet read his work, this offers a fine place to start, and if it is not for every reader -- and to be honest he is not always for me -- all should be able to appreciate his gift.
"Two eyewits trump no evidence." March 15, 2008
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
As Eric Cash and Ike Marcus are walking Ike's drunk friend, Steve Boulware, home from an all-nighter in New York City, they are confronted by two "dark" males, intent upon robbery. Eric immediately "gives it up," but Ike quietly approaches the robbers, saying "Not tonight, my man." Within seconds, he is dead, shot in the chest. Accounts of the robbery and murder differ among the witnesses, and the police, led by Det. Matty Clark, a long-time Irish cop, take Eric, a victim, into custody on suspicion, interrogating him and turning him into a permanent enemy.
New York's Lower East Side, where the action takes place, is changing. Bohemian students wanting to be poets and writers, like Eric and Ike, have moved in. Many long-time immigrant populations have moved out, and the neighborhood is racially and culturally mixed. Almost anything seems to go, socially, and drugs are an active part of the scene. Looming over the area are the Lemlichs, a series of project houses in which the residents do whatever they can to survive, often ganging up against a hostile outside world and resorting to drug sales for income and escape.
Det. Matty Clark, running the investigation, is stymied by the lack of evidence and witnesses, the reluctance of the neighborhood to talk, and the desire of his own department to close the case as soon as possible--without involving the press. Ike's father, Billy Marcus, numbed by the news of his son's murder, is reliving his life with Ike, alternately blaming himself, the police, and Ike's companions for Ike's death. Eric Cash, wanting to escape the horrors of the murder, is hoping to move elsewhere, the fruitlessness of his life as a writer finally recognized.
Famous for his ability to tell a story in the dialogue of street slang, author Richard Price creates a panorama of life in the city so vivid that it feels like an unpleasant movie unreeling behind one's eyes. The dialogue and the images it inspires are realistic, gritty, and often full of heartache, as characters grow. Their interactions become the clashes and miseries we experience in nightmares. As Price explores various points of view, he also shows the randomness of the characters' interconnections and the power of the city itself to alter dreams and the future.
As Price explores his characters and their behavior, he sometimes veers off into subplots which delay the story without adding significant new information. Matty Clark's problems with his sons, his brief flirtation with Billy Marcus's distraught wife, and a long section in which Steve Boulware conducts Ike's memorial service could have been shortened significantly, while still retaining thematic integrity. Price's vision is huge, and his ability to show the widening circles by which one event can draw in large numbers of unsuspecting characters is successful--despite the novel's excesses. n Mary Whipple
Clockers: A Novel
Samaritan (GMA June Pick)
Color of Money, Sea of Love, Night and the City: Three Screenplays
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