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Lush Life: A Novel By Richard Price ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux )
Release Date: 2008-03-04
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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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Amazon.com Review
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
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 cool talk, not that much to say ( tburket )
As a first-time reader of Richard Price, his rippling dialog was certainly the highlight. His story is a vehicle for talk, not for mystery and plot twists. Some scenes are so crisp and brisk, done almost entirely through dialog.
We know who committed the crime early, and the incident isn't much of one on which to hang a story. Instead, we go behind the scenes for police process and for character development of the main detective, the parents of the victim, and assorted others. From a safe perch in suburbia, contemplation of street life in turbulent city neighborhoods can be quite entertaining in the hands of a guy like Mr. Price.
With no real mystery or surprises of any magnitude, the story eventually loses momentum, given that the characters are not that interesting and some relatively superfluous subplots sap some energy. Billy Marcus and Boulware were rather tedious and caused me to skim some sections.
Tristan was a freshly drawn character and perhaps could have been developed further.
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TOUCHING THE LOST SOULS
I knew that Richard Price was a writer of note, but I had not been enticed enough in the past to read his work. Well, once Lush Life arrived, I couldn't put it down. Every chance I got, I'd grab another 5-7 pages. One Saturday, I read Lush Life for 3 hours straight and loved it. You are just sucked into this story.
Price is a master at getting into the 'nitty gritty' of his characters. They're all truly lost souls, but we learn such compassion for them and garner a sense of what makes them tick. Price really writes so well - you can almost smell the air in the room and the adrenaline pumping through the characters' bodies...It's comtemporary; it's heart-wrenching; it's too true. Loved it!
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 Lush and Lengthy
I found myself in the last 125 or so pages skimming the text, just wanting to finish the story, but no longer interested enough in the characters to read carefully. This is not a good sign. Price has a nice sense of the setting but, really, there isn't enough of a story, and what's there isn't interestng enough, to justify the book's 450 pages. The quirky style is a question of taste; I rather like it but I could see it beginning to annoy less patient readers. Other, more genre-oriented writers -- Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosely -- do this sort of thing better, with more focus and discipline.
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 The Price is Right ( billcap )
Richard Price is as good of a dialogue writer as exists today in my mind. "Lush Life" is his latest novel that brilliantly showcases his skills and keen knowledge and insights of city life, particularly NYC life.
Other reviewers have already covered the plot so I won't spend my commentary focusing on that. The novels pace is criticized by some reviewers but I view the pace of the novel from a different perspective. The first third of the book moves at lightning speed -- from Ike Marcus's murder through Eric Cash's interrogation. The action and especially dialogue is sharp and crisp with Price in full control. Where other reviewers felt the book slowed at this point, I think Price did a great job capturing the ebb and flow of the investigation that slows to a crawl and this is reflected in the pace of the book.
Ultimately, Price delivers not only great dialogue but great lead characters. One gets immersed in the psyche of Eric Cash, the aspiring actor and restaurant manager who begins to realize his life is not leading where he'd like; Billy Marcus, the grieving father of Ike, shutting out family and friends and trying to cope with extreme loss; Matty Clark, the NYPD detective whose family life is a wreck but committed to his job and work. While we all have seen these character types before, Price makes them feel fresh and new, weaves them and their stories together seamlessly and adds the additional layer of his brilliant dialogue between the characters. Lastly, Price creates a real sense of place -- the Lower East Side of NYC and the rest of the NY metro area come to life. Being from the area, the city comes alive on the pages of "Lush Life".
All in all, this is one of the better books I've read this year and highly recommend investing the time to read "Lush Life".
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Warning to crime novelists ( jimdefilippi )
Warning to crime novelists: This book is so good it might make you want to toss it all in.
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