Lush Life

The previous two books I've read by Richard Price, Clockers and Freedomland, take place in fictional Demarest, New Jersey, a creation of Price's that is nestled somewhere around Jersey City and Hoboken. But Lush Life is set in the very real Lower East Side of New York City, and one can speculate that Price was inspired to write this book by walking its streets, which are lined with velvet-roped nightclubs, punk-rock venues, young hoodlums, and the ghosts of the immigrants that settled it in the last century. The neighborhood is the main character of the piece.

It's on Eldridge Street that the crime that the book's plot pivots on takes place. A callow restaurant manager is out on a drunken evening with two men he hardly knows, including a new bartender at his restaurant, when the bartender is shot and killed. The manager, Eric tells the police that they were victims of two stick-up men, one black and one Latin. But the police, particularly the hard-boiled detective Matty Clark, think that Eric may be lying. Meanwhile the real killer is struggling to cope in a neighborhood of despair, with a brutal stepfather, and Clark is dealing with the police bureaucracy and two sons from upstate that are dealing drugs.

The book, at it's most banal, is like a special episode of Law and Order, but at its best it crackles with electricity, particularly in telling the story of Eric, who is one of the many artistic types roaming New York, either hoping to be actors, writers, or anything but what they are. The police procedural aspects are also good, as Price seems to have done his homework on what happens at One Police Plaza. I have to give a man credit for trawling in waters that are nearly fished out--how many books about NYC cops have been written? In the thousands? But this one feels fresh.

I thought the book was weakest when Price gets into the head of the assailant, who is an amateur poet. It made me think of the old Eddie Murphy sketch: "Cill my landlord!" When he was writing from the point of view of the street toughs in the neighborhood my eye naturally scanned ahead, hoping to get back to the other characters.