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A review by richardwells
Lush Life by Richard Price
4.0
Don't pick up a copy of Richard Price's "Lush Life," unless you're ready to give up your weekend. It's compulsively readable, and it's that good. It's also pretty depressing, but depressing in that, "Oh, God, that's life," way.
"Lush Life," is a police procedural that takes place over a little more than a week in the gentrified Inferno of NYC's lower east side. We meet the gentry, the old-timers, the cops, and, of course, the criminals. Nobody's clean, everybody's skimming, everybody's on the make for one thing or another, one guy gets shot in a mugging gone bad, and hell breaks loose in hell.
"Lush Life," has a lot going for it. The characters seem right, and true; the mileu is nailed; most of the pieces seem to be absolutely right-on, though I had a problem with a New Orleans style memorial service that tipped over the top; and the dialogue is so good it could have been written by Satan himself. (It's not the way real people talk, it's the way these people talk. Price's way with dialogue is comparable to Mamet's in that both writers create ways of speaking, rather than transcribing how people speak.) One character seems to be the moral hinge of the novel - the father of the young man killed in the mugging. He's both pathetic, and a wraith, and he falls apart and comes back together more than once as he reaches for meaning and redemption.
Is there meaning, is there redemption? Check out the last stanza of Billy Strayhorn's incredible lyrics to the Duke Ellington tune, Lush Life:
"Romance is mush/stifling those who strive/so I'll live a lush life in some small dive/And there I'll be/While I rot with the rest/of those whose lives are lonely too..."
"Lush Life," is a police procedural that takes place over a little more than a week in the gentrified Inferno of NYC's lower east side. We meet the gentry, the old-timers, the cops, and, of course, the criminals. Nobody's clean, everybody's skimming, everybody's on the make for one thing or another, one guy gets shot in a mugging gone bad, and hell breaks loose in hell.
"Lush Life," has a lot going for it. The characters seem right, and true; the mileu is nailed; most of the pieces seem to be absolutely right-on, though I had a problem with a New Orleans style memorial service that tipped over the top; and the dialogue is so good it could have been written by Satan himself. (It's not the way real people talk, it's the way these people talk. Price's way with dialogue is comparable to Mamet's in that both writers create ways of speaking, rather than transcribing how people speak.) One character seems to be the moral hinge of the novel - the father of the young man killed in the mugging. He's both pathetic, and a wraith, and he falls apart and comes back together more than once as he reaches for meaning and redemption.
Is there meaning, is there redemption? Check out the last stanza of Billy Strayhorn's incredible lyrics to the Duke Ellington tune, Lush Life:
"Romance is mush/stifling those who strive/so I'll live a lush life in some small dive/And there I'll be/While I rot with the rest/of those whose lives are lonely too..."