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Lush Life: A Novel | 
| Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $17.16
You Save: $8.84 (34%)
Rating:  163 reviews
Sales Rank: 572
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.6
ISBN: 0374299250
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374299255
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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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
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 158 more reviews...
A Touch Too Lush November 14, 2007
107 out of 119 found this review helpful
Although I'm fairly familiar with Price through his film and television work, and have had "The Wanderers" sitting on my bookshelf for years, I've never read one of his novels until now. Set in a post 9/11, post Gulianni, rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side, the story revolves around a mugging turned murder, and how it affects everyone invovled. The framework is more or less that of a police procedural, where we meet the muggers and perps, see it all go down, meet the police who come along to pick up the peices, and then watch them all interact over the course of the following week.
Price is widely regarded as a master of dialogue, and a master of capturing how people walk it and talk it in the real world. And he certainly does that here, conveying almost everything important via dialogue, which is often heavily spiced with street slang or on the job jargon (which some readers may find offputting). Moreover s a fan of procedurals, I was hooked from the get go by Price's ability to set up the situation, show it go down, and then maintain the seperate threads. Indeed, for the first third of the book, I was completely engrossed.
However, after around 150 pages, he story loses momentum, and the final third of the book definitely drags. A large part of this has to do with the various perspectives Price keep shifting between, and his inability to trim away the fat. While it makes sense that we spend a good deal of time with lead detective Matty, who's trying to sort through conflicting statements and witness accounts, the story isn't helped by his semi-flirtation with the relative of the victim, and a subplot invovling his own stupid kids is really unnecessary. We also spend a lot of time with Eric Cash, whose role changes from victim to suspect to witness, and is traumatized by these events. That's all fine, but do we really need subplots about his sex-worker studying girlfriend in the Phillipines, or his abortive attempt to deal coke?
Of course, Price is trying to do more than write a crime procedural, and these subplots all feed into the broader themes he's trying to explore. These are pretty fundamental at their core: what happens to us/how do we feel when we realize that our lives aren't what we had planned, or that we've somehow failed ourselves. for example, Matty is a good cop but a failed father, Eric is a good maitre'd but a failed actor. This is all well and good, but Price doesn't handle these themes with nearly the same accumen as he does his dialogue and descriptive details. It's a good read, but it gets so swamped by extraneous characters and situation that I went from loving it to merely liking it by page 450 or so.
 A little too much style, a little too little substance November 25, 2007
49 out of 62 found this review helpful
It is my belief that when you watch a movie, the best acting comes when you don't notice that the person is acting; you become absorbed in the film and forget that the actor is merely playing a part. Similarly, often the best fiction writing is when you don't really notice the writing; if the narrative is too cleverly written, you might admire the cleverness, but it breaks the spell of being in that fictional world. Which brings me to Richard Price, and more particularly his new novel, Lush Life: it is sometimes a little too stylish for its own good.
The plot of Lush Life centers on an apparent mugging gone wrong. Eric Cash, Ike Marcus and Steve Boulware are walking around late one evening when a pair of wannabe crooks try to rob them. Ike is a little too defiant and gets shot. Steve is out cold, dead drunk and a series of events lead the police to believe Eric is the killer. It is sorted out relatively quickly, but not soon enough to for Eric to avoid a tough interrogation and a few hours in jail.
Lush Life is a crime story, but not the typical sort. It focuses less on the hunt for a murderer and more on the repercussions on all involved. For Eric, the brief arrest is merely the culmination of a very bad evening and the trauma - including dealing with his own cowardice during the mugging - will lead him on a self-destructive path. Similarly, Ike's father, Billy, is unable to cope with the loss of his son. The third principal character, Detective Matty Clark, tries to find the real killer despite an unwillingness by the police brass to really pursue the case (after the embarrassment of Eric's wrongful arrest, they'd like the whole thing to go away). Matty also has to deal with the increasingly unhinged Billy while confronting the effects of his own poor parenting techniques.
There's a lot that's good about Lush Life. There are times when it is compelling reading, and Price often has a good sense of dialogue. On the other hand, there were times when his gritty, streetwise style is a little over-the-top and is distracting; in short, I noticed he was writing rather than just being drawn into his story. Overall, this merits a high three stars; it is a decent book, but there are better ones out there.
 Best I've read since MYSTIC RIVER April 29, 2008
17 out of 23 found this review helpful
LUSH LIFE is the best crime novel I've read since MYSTIC RIVER. Like MYSTIC RIVER, the emphasis is on characterization and setting. The plot is nothing much to brag about. Three men, a bartender, a restaurant manager, and an aspiring actor are held up after clubbing until early in the morning. The bartender refuses to give up his wallet saying "Not tonight, my man" and the gun goes off, killing him.
When two unreliable witnesses point to Eric Cash, the restaurant manager, as the shooter, the investigation heads in the wrong direction. When Matty Clark, the lead investigator, puts Cash through the third degree, he becomes an uncooperative witness.
Price is a master at characterization, especially the minor ones. There's a little Chinese man who may have been robbed by the same hold-up team who's simply a scream. Of the major characters Yolanda, one of Matty's partners, stands out above the rest. She put the "c'" in compassion, but she can be hard when she needs to be, and she's not afraid to put Matty in his place when he needs it. She's also very funny and does a spot-on impression of Matty complaining about "the brass." Billy Marcus, Eric's father, who feels guilty about not being around when his son was growing up, will tear your heart out. He wants to help with the investigation, but he's more of a hindrance than a help until almost the end. To complicate matters, Matty falls for Billy's wife.
Like Dickens and London, Richard Price must spend most of his time walking around New York City. He knows the place like the back of his hand. There's a scene where Fenton Ma, a Chinese detective, interviews a potential witness who sleeps on a plank in a crowded tenement, and sublets it to another Chinese man while he's working. Price also takes us inside the home of Harry Steele, owner of the upscale restaurant where Eric Cash works. It's a former synagogue and Price zooms in on the Jewish astrological tiles, pointing out that there are no people in the representations of the various signs. He also takes us inside BD Wing Funerary that sells paper replicas of everything from Gucci loafers to three-story private houses. The replicas are for dead people. You burn them at Chinese funerals so the dead guy can take them with him into the afterlife.
Thematically, the novel is about more than just a sense of physical loss, Eric Cash, once an aspiring actor and screen writer, hates himself because he fell for the lure of fame when he was really always only a waiter. Matty Clark also has two sons who are heading down the wrong path. He can't help but wonder if they would have turned out better if he'd been around while they were growing up. There's a sort of "There but for the grace of God" thing going on as well. Tristan, the trigger man during the hold-up, is a sympathetic character in many respects. He lives with his abusive former step father, his dead mother's former husband, and he babysits "The Hamsters," his former step father's children from his new relationship. He's really a good kid, as Yolanda intuits immediately of course, but he doesn't know how to be a man and has no role models.
Early on, LUSH LIFE can be a little off-putting in respect to language. It's hard to interpret some of the slang, but Price is really showing the reader respect by not spelling out every little thing for him. Hang in there. Eventually, it`ll grow on you.
Frenetic and passionate, Price is not for every reader November 7, 2007
16 out of 19 found this review helpful
Richard Price stands among that unusual collection of period writers whose period is right now; its one that his style matches beautifully. As with his previous works, Price writes with an energy that often bounces from frenetic to manic, high octane sentences most often delivered in the form of dialogue. Indeed, Lush Life again demonstrates why many young writers look to Price's example in their efforts to master dialogue. Huge amounts of information, both of characters, plot, and context arrive in the form of rapid fire verbal banter, creating a sort of amphetamine driven tale. To be clear, that is not meant to imply, Price is not a careful writer - far from it - this instead is a highly intentional effect. That said, this style leads to a novel that will not suit every readers taste; while enjoying Lush Life, I often found its better than 400 pages exhausting.
Readers with a taste for Price, however, will surely be impressed. Lush Life offers a view of New York both compelling and familiar, in language often raw and fierce, and always with a generous dollop of humor. For those long curious in Price but who have not yet read his work, this offers a fine place to start, and if it is not for every reader -- and to be honest he is not always for me -- all should be able to appreciate his gift.
 Harder to Get Into than Fort Knox October 26, 2007
13 out of 29 found this review helpful
The opening 10 pages of this book took me 20 minutes to slog through, at which point I gave up. The setting was unclear, the dialogue 'too cool and hip' without being clear who was saying what and to whom they were saying it, and the pacing was quicksand slow. I love crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. But not this one.
Not recommended.
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