| Lush Life |  | Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Category: Book
Buy Used: $81.08
Rating:  153 reviews
Format: Import
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.5
ISBN: 0747595445
EAN: 9780747595441
ASIN: 0747595445
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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| Customer Reviews: Read 148 more reviews...
Romance is mush August 25, 2008
I've been a Richard Price fan since The Wanderers. He is a master of street language, a moralist in spite of himself, and a champion of the abused, lonely, and angry. He has sometimes reached for grander themes and bigger stakes - at first glance Lush Life seems almost a genre piece - but his eye for hypocrisy and complexity is sharper than ever. His characters don't represent so much as breathe: this seems like a story about real people rather than a drama with several types. The novel still has its own milieu, but it's rooted more in place than in social group; as result it's more about there than them. That, of course, allows the characters to grow on us and grate us on their own, independent of anything that feels like authorial intent. The character that appealed most to me was Tristan, whose anger and invisibility were heartbreaking. He seemed like one of the hoppers from the fourth season of The Wire, but that was fine with me because he also had a life of his own. The obnoxious Eric Cash never weasled his way into my heart, but I grudgingly acknowledged the sinful integrity of his attempts to deal with loss, pain, and age. A more heroic protagonist wouldn't have served the novel as well. The same was true of Matty Clark, a cop in the Jimmy McNulty mold. The contrast with his partner, Yolanda, was a bit too perfect for my taste, but in a novel with so much denial and false feeling, it was nice that she was there to actually care about people and act with compassion. The novel read like a house afire - it took two days to read but it felt like one sitting. Thinking about the book afterwards, I admired the way seemingly random: it's a story about a city, a seaboard, a nation at this point in time. It's also a novel obsessed with the past. From the burned out synagogue to the Riis photos in the basement, this is a world where the past and present coexist. People haven't exactly forgotten the past since they use it to enhance their experience, but the sacred has leached from the world. The only place it lingers is in human intimacy, whether that involves grief, duty, or love.
 good but tries too hard August 22, 2008
Started out really strong for me. Price does a wonderful job nailing the Lower East Side contemporary milieu. Characters are quickly and clearly drawn and the set up keeps you turning the pages. But about halfway through, it began to lose steam for me. A) It's basically a book-length police procedural, which I'm personally not that into (but Price has written for the cable series The Wire, so it makes sense). B) His dialogue is supposed to be amazing, but I found it as banal as anything you hear on TV. C) The myriad storyline became uninteresting, uninspired, a little lost, melodramatic. Some really long, wincingly bad scenes that were overwritten and should've been edited down further. A good film comparison would be the 2005 Oscar-winning CRASH.
As good as you'd expect from Price August 14, 2008
Richard Price's writing career has established him as an author who can do it all, from novels to movies to TV, and after a few years of contributing his talents to the dearly departed TV classic The Wire he's returned to the printed word in a big way with Lush Life. Like a great deal of Price's work it has its overly slow spots, but Lush Life still marks a significant step up in quality from Price's last book, the merely good Samaritan, and comes pretty close to the level of the classic Clockers. It's both a heavily detailed crime procedural and a sweeping urban drama, with a wide-ranging scope that captures the aftermath of a startling crime from the viewpoint of everyone affected, from witnesses to perpetrators to detectives to friends and family. Much like Clockers, it uses an early murder and its subsequent investigation as a jumping-off point for an examination of the internal tensions and pressures that impact cities and their put-upon residents. In the process, it showcases all of Price's enormous gifts as a storyteller: his mastery of place; his knack for almost frighteningly believable dialogue and characterization; and above all else his unmatched ability to translate discomfort and confusion onto the page.
As usual for Price, Lush Life is less about plot than about characters and setting, with an exacting attention to detail and tough-edged urban realism that marks much of the best crime fiction. Price's insight into the minds of his protagonists allows you to feel sympathy for them even when they behave in a less-than-exemplary manner, and even the gallery of supporting characters who fill out the periphery are fully realized and have stories of their own to tell. Even the city of New York itself becomes a character, ethnically diverse, rich with history, and home to people with aspirations to be just about everything except for what they actually are. Echoing one of the best of the many great aspects of The Wire, Lush Life takes place in a world in which few people get to be better or worse than anyone else; the great mass of its characters lie somewhere in a vast and ambiguous middle ground. In a refreshingly sharp contrast to TV shows where cops have all the answers, Lush Life finds its homicide investigators plagued by flawed eyewitness testimony, office politics, time and manpower crunches, and simple inertia.
Although Price doesn't make much of an effort to conceal his killer's identity, the book's plot itself isn't particularly different from standard murder-mystery fare. Shortly after being introduced, Ike Marcus, an energetic young bartender and aspring actor in a Lower East Side filled with similar types, is fatally shot during a robbery gone wrong after a night out at the bars. Emerging from the confusion of the early investigation, the story eventually coalesces around four central characters: Matty Clark, the lead investigator on the case; Billy Marcus, the victim's father; Tristan Acevedo, the apparent triggerman; and Eric Cash, the victim's boss and a witness to the shooting, whom Matty quickly fixes upon as his prime suspect. Between them these four widely disparate protagonists struggle under a wide range of unfulfilled aspirations and personal issues, all of which are magnified as they try to go on with their lives following a life-altering event. The book actually reaches its peak early with the chaotic, maddening rush of the investigation's early stages and the gut-wrenching interrogation of Eric by Matty and his partner, a scene laden with dramatic irony as the detectives put all of their energy into breaking the will of a suspect whom we know is really innocent. When the case loses some its momentum the book does as well, with Price getting more and more into the character arcs at the occasional expense of narrative drive. There were a few times, most notably a rather awkward memorial service for the murder victim, that I couldn't help but wish Price would move things along, superbly rendered as they may have been.
Any pacing issues aside, though, Lush Life is still a compelling piece of urban crime fiction from a master of the style. As always, Price's individualistic writing style and extensive knowledge of city life makes for fascinating reading even when his characters are doing nothing more than talking. Anyone who would rather watch drying paint than another episode of the latest CSI or Law and Order incarnation is advised to check it out.
 A brilliant novel of New York City August 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Often, in my own personal grading system, a novel about crime and punishment that isn't by Dostoevsky, nearly always loses a point for that reason. Whether I bought the book in an airport may or may not, but usually does lose another star. "Lush Life" is not Dostoevsky, but it is a great and humane novel about a crime that is committed at the beginning of the book, is the story of the police investigation into the murder, and is told largely from the point of view of at least one of the characters most intimately involved in the case. Although "Crime and Punishment" is told mostly through the killer's point of view and "Lush Life" is told mainly through one police detective's POV, other similarities invite the comparison. And even though it is not a great Russian novel, "Lush Life" is a novel about New York City that approaches greatness in its portrayal of the interior life of people in and of that city.
But since it is literature, and even great literature can seem tedious at times, a potential reader might be wary that he/she would have to bring too much energy to reading the novel. Don't worry about that. This book is immediately engaging on many levels. Full of suspense and uncertainty - a novel told from the head of a NYPD detective could hardly avoid that - "Lush Life" is, among other things, a nail-biter story that passionately and primarily describes a police investigation into a murder that occurred in the lower east side of Manhattan, without sentimentality, but with the tenderest possible empathy for nearly all the characters, good guys and bad guys alike. (There is a female detective who shows promise as a character, but ultimately fails to make the reader care about her in the same way as most of the other main characters - a fact not present in Dostoevsky - but this is forgivable because, in a novel of this precise scope, an exploration into the inner life of yet another character might overburden the story.) The prose is diamond-sharp and satisfying without being self-conscious as so many works of "literary fiction" are. And it's realistic to the tiniest detail. I know this because I am an attorney who works with NYPD officers and detectives in the field of law enforcement in NYC. In fact, I've never read or seen any books, films, television shows, etc., that even come close to describing the way things are actually done.
Although it would be misleading to call this "genre" fiction, If you are interested in the genre fiction about crimes, that also happens to be (great?) literature, this is the book for you. Although the story follows a familiar - but not quite formulaic - trajectory, it is not a cookie-cutter airport book, even if you buy it in an airport. The accomplished craft with which the novel is made makes "Lush Life" satisfying in a way most books of this genre cannot approach.
Vivid depiction of the Lower East Side but lacking momentum August 9, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Two detectives work to unravel the story behind a robbery gone bad. The setting--the Lower East Side (of Manhattan)--is as much a character in this police procedural as any human character. Richard Price vividly depicts this neighborhood and believably captures the gritty street dialog used by the detectives and suspected perpetrators. The first third of the book moves quickly, but the pace lags in the middle as the investigation stalls. With the investigation going nowhere, Price delves too deeply into subplots and into his characters' inner psyches without maintaining the momentum. Fans of the genre will enjoy this novel, but others will find it tedious.
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