Lushlife
Lush Life, by Richard Price (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)
The first few chapters of Richard Price’s Lush Life read like a cross between Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and a police procedural. Then the text start to deepen, and layers of history form and slide into each other, and suddenly you’re peering down into an archaeological dig—not just of New York’s Lower East Side but of the human spirit. There’s more warmth here than Wolfe would ever countenance; more perspective than urban crimes are ever allowed.
Yet the story’s as gritty as it comes, and vivid in a way that reminds you Price wrote for The Wire. He takes a half-gentrified neighborhood, yuppies and Hispanics and orthodox Jews and Fujanese Chinese immigrants, and shakes it up with a random fatal shooting. He chooses what he knows to be the media’s favorite victim: a young, white aspiring artist, his dreams bleeding out while his friends avert their eyes. And as soon as yellow tape wraps the scene, and the young folk turn it into an urban shrine, and the young man’s father goes berserk, and Det. Matty Clark starts ignoring the brass, and the only witness refuses to talk … all the little metal balls start clacking together, characters colliding and bouncing off each other as their individual fates play out.
The book’s more heroic than fatalistic, though—once you remember that the heroes are made entirely of clay. Price shows you how hard people try, and how often they fail. He loves the contradictions: Clark gruffly tender, gentle with the victim’s father but disgusted by his own wayward sons, whom he calls “the Big One” and “the Other One.” Price brings you close, waits until you’re willing to smell these people’s sweat and taste their regret. Then the novel turns redemptive, bringing strong characters full circle in a way nobody’s quite pulled off since Balzac.
There’s nothing especially surprising as the story unfolds; it’s the inexorability that pulls you through. That, and the authenticity. Some writers take us into a sharply perfect world—peopled by shadows. Others choreograph giant battle scenes and pageantry—and never come in for a close-up. Those who write intimately of humanity’s quirks and desires write characters who might as well be floating in ether. But Price is compelling on all three levels: He observes like a savant, understands like a village elder and writes dialogue with perfect pitch. You know where you are. You sense the clashes, the tightening circles. You watch an eyelid flutter, a pupil dilate.
You also realize, as he captures every pause and rush of words, every curse and slangy shortcut, how amazing human conversation really is. As you move through this dense book, its power grows—because by capturing the way people really think and talk, Price captures their souls. And it’s that candor, not Wolfian riffs or plot machinations, that makes you care what happens—to the place and the people. —Jeannette Cooperman, Staff Writer
[Note: This is the first in a new series in which editors write about what we happen to be reading, be the books St. Louis-focused or not. Stay tuned for Stephen Schenkenberg's look back at his 2008 reads.]
