Lush Life: A Novel | Richard Price

Lush Life: A Novel | Richard Price | More here than the great dialogue

books:

Lush Life: A Novel

	Lush Life: A Novel Richard Price Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 163 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hard to put down

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

More here than the great dialogue

For me, it was the characters that made "Lush Life", not just the dialogue, and Price seems to be able to make a name into a person with just a few words. I liked this book because it was a police procedural in which the victims, witnesses and perpetrators of the crime around which it centers were each treated fairly by the author. I was interested in all of them.

Price really has the "show, don't tell" thing down. He's never preachy or morbid, like some crime-fiction authors, but doesn't shy away from the tension created by a neighborhood that is a gentrifying ex-ghetto cozying up to the modern-day projects. At the beginning of the book, the author makes the reader feel satisfyingly involved in the intense questioning of murder suspect Eric Cash by detectives Matty Clark and Yolanda Bello, but by the time it is revealed that Cash didn't do it, the reader feels as sleazy and as sorry as the interrogators do for how they leaned on him. Cash is a weak person -- and Clark and Bello are flawed, too -- but they are all very human. So are the neighborhood lawyers, reporters, crazies and thugs, and the young shooter himself.

Price unflinchingly calls the racism, classism and PD bureaucracy as he sees them, but injects enough humor into the book that reading it is a sweet experience, not a sour one. "Lush Life"'s main draw isn't the plot, which is fairly standard. The best thing about the novel is the people who inhabit Price's Lower East Side, good, bad and indifferent.

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Literature or formula? Don't try for both

Like many I'd heard of Richard Price but never really read his books, although many told me since I love Dennis Lehane I would definitely enjoy Price. "Lush Life" tells the story of a Manhattan mugging gone even more wrong, and his characters are soon going all over the place as the pieces start to come together.

Price definitely has an ear for dialogue, but the story goes in so many different directions with so many different points of view that I literally said aloud at one point "would you just settle on one or two characters, I'm getting lost!" Like Lehane Price can go on the edge of crude elegance with his prose, which keeps "Lush Life" mostly readable, but the somewhat pat ending is a letdown. I will admit, though, that "Lush Life" intrigued me enough to want to seek out Price's other work. I would imagine those who are already fans of Price would enjoy this book, but it's hard going for a first timer.

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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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