Amazon Lush Life: A Novel

Lush Life: A Novel

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Editorial Review:

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).

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

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• The Ugly of the City
  The author of "Clockers" and "Samaritan" has hit the ugly, dirty, life-filled streets of New York again with a murder to solve and all the skeletons in the closet of a cast of characters, from the murder victim's father to the head detectives, Yolonda and Matty. The street jargon, street food, and street life put the surbanite into neighborhoods they'd never see except on television or the big screen. Price's dialogue never wavers; his characters exist on many levels. This is a fast-paced police procedural... more info

• Not easy to set aside
  When I hear "police procedural", I think "mystery". This book is suspenseful but it is not truly a mystery, at least not in the way we usually mean. The puzzles in this book are those that most readers want in all good books, the ones that keep the pages turning. I wanted to know what the book's characters would say and do. I wanted to know who would come to a bad end and who would fare well. For me, the suspense was in these questions rather than who committed what crime. Besides, there were plenty of... more info

• Disappointing, shallow, mean-spirited, and a waste of time
  This is an overblown, contrived and thin satire masquerading as social realism. I had high expectations, but I found the book predictable and self-important. Price seems to think he's wiser and more street-smart than any of his characters, but to me the book just showed how limited his vision is, whether he's looking at cops, criminals, poor young Hispanics, hipsters.... He has a good ear for voices but to make a great novel, you also need sympathetic characters and a compelling plot. This is one of those... more info

• Another keeper!
  Yes, this is a crime novel and the principal murder is shattering but it's also just one ingredient in a tragic stew of cops, thugs, and other walking wounded. The chief investigators find themselves hopelessly entangled in the lives of the victimized. A theme this author likes to explore. Price colors his characters with rich detail and creates dialogue that sings like urban poetry. This is like a literary version of the great HBO series "The Wire". He is one of the best novelists working today and I... more info

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