A rare breed among crime
novelists, Richard Price (Clockers) has always been more interested in people and
places than plot, though he's a master at all three. So it's no surprise that
his powerful new Lush Life does away with any conventional suspense. The story
billows out from a murder on the Lower East Side, but Price doesn't bother to
keep readers in the dark about the victims, the perpetrator, or any other
question mark he might be saving for the big reveal. The ins and outs of the
crime itself don't really interest him, but the way it reverberates through
that specific corner of the city and through the lives of the people involved make
the book profoundly compelling. Much like HBO's The Wire, for which Price
occasionally wrote, Lush Life takes a more kaleidoscopic view of crime than
typical genre fare; just one bullet sets many different wheels in motion, and
Price is keenly attuned to all of them.
Once lined with tenement
houses, Price's Lower East Side "Candyland" is now a neighborhood "in
transition," which is realtor-speak for rapid gentrification. Property values
are heading north, as well-to-do young urbanites (mostly white) are buying
condos and frequenting trendy new fusion restaurants, but longtime residents
(mostly non-white) haven't faded into the woodwork yet. Those two worlds
collide when a bartender, after a long night of drinking with two
acquaintances, gets shot in a botched mugging attempt. Due to false eyewitness
testimony, suspicion immediately falls on Eric Cash, a local restaurant manager
and failed writer who claims the three were accosted by two junior hoods. Lead
detective Matty Clark and his partner, Yolanda, try to railroad Eric into
implicating himself, but there's more to the case than they realize.
The detectives' long
session in the box with their chief suspect—who, guilty or innocent, is
reduced to a shell of his former self—showcases Price's fine ear for
dialogue and lends the book a simmering tension that proves ulcerous as it
expands outward. The central characters are all well-sketched, particularly
Eric, whose esteem is destroyed as collateral damage, but Price does even
better work on the periphery with sad creations like the victim's father, whose
bereavement leaves him dangerously adrift, or a "quality-of-life" police unit
that cleans up the neighborhood one petty bust at a time. Taken all together,
Price's observations provide a vivid cartography of an evolving city.