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Lush Life: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $14.25
You Save: $11.75 (45%)
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Rating:  144 reviews
Sales Rank: 773
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Mint, brand new, and never opened to read and ready to ship after 7/19 for your gift list or treat yourself and add to your own collection. BCE
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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...
 Probably enough substance, but way too much style July 18, 2008
I really struggled to get through this novel, mainly because it was way too much about trying to dazzle me with its author's intellect and not enough about telling a story that I could follow without a brain-ache. This may be the way people talk and think, but I'm not entirely convinced. It didn't connect with me, I didn't identify with the characters, and finally it was not worth the trouble.
 Catch him. Next time. July 17, 2008
I admire Richard Price -- particularly his dialogue -- but found this very confusing -- and the main character (?) Eric Cash -- less than compelling. Catch him. Next time.
Literature or formula? Don't try for both July 17, 2008
Like many I'd heard of Richard Price but never really read his books, although many told me since I love Dennis Lehane I would definitely enjoy Price. "Lush Life" tells the story of a Manhattan mugging gone even more wrong, and his characters are soon going all over the place as the pieces start to come together.
Price definitely has an ear for dialogue, but the story goes in so many different directions with so many different points of view that I literally said aloud at one point "would you just settle on one or two characters, I'm getting lost!" Like Lehane Price can go on the edge of crude elegance with his prose, which keeps "Lush Life" mostly readable, but the somewhat pat ending is a letdown. I will admit, though, that "Lush Life" intrigued me enough to want to seek out Price's other work. I would imagine those who are already fans of Price would enjoy this book, but it's hard going for a first timer.
 July 17, 2008
For me, it was the characters that made "Lush Life", not just the dialogue, and Price seems to be able to make a name into a person with just a few words. I liked this book because it was a police procedural in which the victims, witnesses and perpetrators of the crime around which it centers were each treated fairly by the author. I was interested in all of them.
Price really has the "show, don't tell" thing down. He's never preachy or morbid, like some crime-fiction authors, but doesn't shy away from the tension created by a neighborhood that is a gentrifying ex-ghetto cozying up to the modern-day projects. At the beginning of the book, the author makes the reader feel satisfyingly involved in the intense questioning of murder suspect Eric Cash by detectives Matty Clark and Yolanda Bello, but by the time it is revealed that Cash doesn't do it, the reader feels as sleazy and as sorry as the interrogators for how they leaned on him. Cash is a weak person -- and Clark and Bello are flawed, too -- but they are all very human. So are the neighborhood lawyers, reporters, crazies and thugs, and the young shooter himself.
Price unflinchingly calls the racism, classism and PD bureaucracy as he sees them, but injects enough humor into the book that reading it is a sweet experience, not a sour one. "Lush Life"'s main draw isn't the plot, which is fairly standard. The best thing about the novel is the people who inhabit Price's Lower East Side, good, bad and indifferent.
Price's Best ? July 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I picked up Lush Life prepared to like it, because I don't know of a better writer today with an eye for detail and an ear for detail. Those two senses make for a powerful combination when it comes to writing, as long as you have the discipline. And, for all of its 400-plus pages, Price shows he is up to the task. The writing never sags. In flashes, he shows that he could create such a creamy style that you might keel over from too many calories. In most of the book, you get the feeling that Price has set his characters in motion and just watches them act based on their essence. The narrative follows no typical arc for mystery fiction or suspense -- even though the centerpiece is a murder and how the city reacts around the violence. It might help to know New York's lower east side, but that's no requirement; I live out west. This is about humanity bouncing off each other, living with each other, setting standards for behavior as individuals and collectively, in small informal groups and in large organized ones. In the end, one line stays with me, and it surfaces in a brilliant spot: "Do you survive because of what is in you? Or because of what isn't..." Put this up there with Freedomland and Clockers, but don't overlook The Wanderers, Samaritan, and Bloodbrothers.
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