Lush Life: A Novel | Richard Price | The Talk On the Street

Lush Life: A Novel | Richard Price | Hard to put down

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Lush Life: A Novel

	Lush Life: A Novel Richard Price Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 165 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Talk On the Street

The master of vernacular and dialogue, Richard Price takes readers street level for a joyride across New York's Lower East Side in his latest novel, LUSH LIFE.

Ike Marcus, an aspiring actor working as a bartender at one of the neighborhood's trendier nightspots, is gunned down outside a friend's apartment building when he flips off one of his would-be muggers by telling him, "not tonight my man." Sometimes last words become famous, and Ike's are soon making headlines and showing up on cheap t-shirts around the country.

A young and handsome Jewish kid from the suburbs, Marcus is the sort of victim who makes instant headlines and overnight street shrines. His white skin, photogenic face, and American Dream background will ensure his murder receives as much front page treatment from the tabloids, as they'll provide cable news networks an opportunity to treat his death as an around-the-clock "developing story." Ike Marcus' death is a bigger worry for the area's gallery owners and local merchants and developers than it is for his killers. The NYPD knows from the jump it's unable to treat this case as just another late night shooting statistic.

Richard Price's stories have a reputation for immersing readers into the chain of events, and LUSH LIFE practically embeds them into the midst of its hectic, time-sensitive police procedural. Dynamic characterization flows throughout a fast-paced storyline, leaving readers with the impression of being involved in the sweeps and canvassing, the mind games and con jobs of the detectives' investigation. LUSH LIFE is likely to cost precious sleep time if you take it with you to bed, and can cause you to miss your stop if you're reading it on the bus or train. "A book you just can't put down" might be a cliché, but it describes Price's novel succinctly.

Despite LUSH LIFE's human drama, and the novel's occupation with personalities and vocabularies, it's neither the cops or suspects, or the victim for that matter, who are the real focus of the story. The heart and soul of this novel is the neighborhood itself.

Once the most densely populated area on the planet, New York's Lower East Side remains a microcosm of the world's disparities in wealth, power and education. Here, high-end boutiques and art galleries sit around the corner from rundown housing projects and dilapidated tenements; a neighborhood where ambitious yuppies, artists and writers, project kids, illegal immigrants, drunks and junkies, and the remnants of a once thriving orthodox Jewish community, are all neighbors. It's also the place of origin for just about everyone in the story; some living there all their lives, while others have been removed by a generation or two but, like Marcus or the character Eric Cash, have returned to the streets their parents and grandparents lived and worked, loved and died. Price's own family roots extend back to the Lower East Side, and the neighborhood's radical mix of races and nationalities, incomes and lifestyles always fascinated him. In many ways LUSH LIFE seems like a tribute to the place.

Since I'd read THE WANDERERS and LADIES' MAN back in the Eighties, I've been a fan of Richard Price. Lately Price was one of the writers for HBO's THE WIRE, a first rate crime drama whose popularity and acclaim were in no small part due to his contributions. "Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced," is how author (and fellow WIRE screenwriter) Dennis Lehane describes the man. I agree. As for this novel's success, it's been reported that Price is now working to turn LUSH LIFE into a movie with producer Scott Rudin, and cable's FX network wants him to adapt the story to a series pilot. I'm looking forward to both.

Other novels by Richard Price:

THE WANDERERS (1974)
BLOODBROTHERS (1976)
LADIES' MAN (1976)
THE BREAKS (1983)
CLOCKERS (1992)
FREEDOMLAND (1998)
SAMARITAN (2003)

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Hard to put down

Lush life is a delicious thriller that once you satrt is hard to put down

A Moving, Exciting Police Story!

This is a moving and exciting police story in which a bartender witnesses a shooting of a fellow bartender and becomes shy of the police after they try and finger him for the shooting. Did he really do it? Will he ever tell the police what he knows? Eric Cash is a character who is caught between the up and coming gentrified New York City and the poor New Yorkers who live in the shadows. Once an up an coming actor, can he survive this trauma? Did he commit the crime? Richard Price, an author known for his hard bitten New York crime stories tells this story like a screenplay. He has written for the television show The Wire and is getting an ever better knack at writing dialogue. I enjoyed this book and completed it in two days. Highly recommended.

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Catch him. Next time.

I admire Richard Price -- particularly his dialogue -- but found this very confusing -- and the main character (?) Eric Cash -- less than compelling. Catch him. Next time.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

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