Richard Price. Lush Life

World Literature Today, Nov-Dec, 2008 by Rita D. Jacobs

Richard Price. Lush Life. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2008. 455 pages. $26. ISBN 978-0-374-29925-5

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Richard Price has always used setting as a character--fully fleshed out, vibrant, quirky--and in Lush Life, he may have surpassed himself. The scene is the Lower East Side of New York, with its rich history, its socioeconomic diversity, and its recent resurgence as, once again, the hip place to be. The streets pulse, as do the people who populate them--from the kids in the housing projects to the cops on the beat to the clever entrepreneurs who turn old venues into new ones that cater to those who want to see and be seen. This is novel as palimpsest, with Price limning the environs with resonant traces of what came before.

Price's narrative begins with a murder, and as the search for the murderer unfolds, he reveals the pain and frustration in many lives, from the murderer's to the cop's to the families touched by the crime. Though this might bring a nod from seasoned readers of police procedurals, Price's work cannot be pigeonholed into an easy genre. He writes novels, not formula books, and when Detective Matty Clark sits down with a suspect, there is no easy way to categorize either the cop or the alleged perpetrator. Matty is as damaged in his way as is Eric Case, the suspect, as is the dead young man's father, Billy Marcus, who can't fathom his son Ike's death. The straightforward and yet ultimately complex message: it's not easy being a man of any age or race in postmillennial America. It seems a little easier to be a woman, though, for in Lush Life the ideal woman may be found in Yolanda Bello, Matty Clark's partner. An unusual siren, her song is her ability to speak in an intimate, nonsexual voice to young men in the housing projects who become immediately confessional or, at the very least, trusting. She is, in a way, the only false note in the novel.

Price has the well-deserved reputation of being the best writer of dialogue in American fiction today. But this should come with the warning that the speech patterns he captures are so fast, so filled with the dialect of the streets, and so attenuated that it takes careful attention to understand what is going on. Yet his language is so evocative of place and character that he can startle the reader out of any complacency that might tempt assumptions about characters.

Lush Life is a post-9/11 novel set in a world that once believed in the eternal verities but that now has only the artifacts of those beliefs: Mary the Virgin showing up as condensation on a freezer door in a local deli, a desanctified synagogue being used as a rich man's home, and Detective Matty Clark looking "south to the financial district, to the absence of the Towers." It's a world we recognize viscerally, for it's the one we live in.

Rita D. Jacobs

Montclair State University