I
seem to have a last-come, first-served approach
to my reading. Despite the giddy piles of unread books littering
my home, the arrival of a new title always brings with it a sense
of urgency and importance. Indeed, I already had a Richard Price
novel in those piles - his last, 2003’s Samaritan
- and had been aware of lavish praise for his books for some years
(Clockers, his 1992 novel, is seemingly the granddaddy
of them all). Nonetheless, when I received this handsome hefty
new hardback, I knew I was lost.
Lush Life is roughly structured as a police
procedural - don’t click away, give me a minute here - set
in Manhattan, and it opens with Price showing us what to expect
from the next 450 pages. The police ‘Quality of Life taxi’
(four officers, “their mantra: Dope, guns, overtime”)
is scouring the streets, “misery lights revolving,”
for crimes and misdemeanours:
Restless, they finally
pull out to honeycomb the streets for an hour of endless tight
right turns: falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner.
Schoolyard, creperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement
museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner.
Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Boulangerie, bar, hat
boutique corner. Iglesia, gelateria, matzo shop, corner. Bollywood,
Buddha, botanica, corner…
It’s a risky and showy opening; but it’s
a showy city. New York is showing itself to us all the time, perpetually
being shown to us on TV and film, so that even someone who has
never been there has plenty of pictures and expectations in mind.
Price’s task is to give us a New York which is both consistent
and surprising. He succeeds, but more than that, he creates an
internally consistent world which is so immersive and engrossing
that for once - and I had always dismissed such claims - I fell
for the reviewerly cliché of really wanting the book to
last much longer than it did, so I could remain in this immaculately
created and fully imagined world for as long as possible.
Price is perhaps better known as a screenwriter
than as a novelist: he’s been Oscar nominated for film work,
won an award for his writing on the more-talked-about-than-viewed
TV series The Wire, and has the thankless task of translating
Tom Rob Smith’s Child
44 into English for the film version (perhaps they held
a gigantic cheque over his eyes so he didn’t know what he
was agreeing to).
From all this you might expect - and you would be
right - that Price’s forte is dialogue. Speech is at the
heart of Lush Life, and a good two-thirds to three-quarters
of the book is taken up with it. This is dialogue which is rich
in street patois and old-cop wisecracks, and which - like Alan
Bennett’s in an entirely different way - appears realistic
through its use of idioms and neologisms but which is far too
artificed and compact to be naturalistic. But even if the lines
of dialogue themselves are artificial, their purpose is entirely
authentic. Price’s people talk over one another, trail off
in the middle of sentences or start to say one thing and then
change to another.
More importantly, almost every exchange of dialogue
in the book conveys not just what is being said, but the psychology
of the character speaking and their history, relationship of power
and motivations toward their interlocutor. It’s there when
the restaurant manager speaks to his employees; when the cop and
the victim’s father talk; and during a magnificent, protracted
interrogation which stretches over dozens of pages. Given that
so much dialogue in fiction is underfed and dysfunctional - providing
characters with a chance to explain what they already know for
the benefit of the reader, clumsily foreshadowing, or just treading
water - Price’s rich exchanges are a wonder, and a treat,
to eavesdrop on: comic, laconic, poetic. You might wonder then
why I haven’t quoted any of it, and the answer is that I’m
not convinced it would work out of context. You’re going
to have to trust me - and Price - on this one.
The rhythms of speech even extend into the narrative
voice, partly I suppose through ‘free indirect style’
- where the narrative adopts the sentiments of the character -
and partly through a furious act of control on Price’s part,
to insist that the prose will be read as he intended. The use
of commas toward the end of this passage is a good example.
…if the driver says
one thing, goes one word over some invisible line, then without
any change of expression, without any warning signs except maybe
a slow straightening up, a sad/disgusted looking off, he steps
back, reaches for the door handle, and the world as they knew
it, is no more.
Richard Price talks about
Lush Life
This also gives an idea of one possible criticism of Lush
Life: there’s a neatness, or slickness, in the dialogue
which can seem too polished, too screenplay. However this is an
unworthy complaint: I would never complain about every line of
a poem being too perfect, so to say the same of dialogue reflects
on the level of my own expectations rather than the level of Price’s
achievement. On top of the dialogue, Price is no slouch at calling
up a great image in the main narrative when he wants to (Lower
East Side has “canyonlike streets with their hanging garden
of ancient fire escapes”).
In all this I have said nothing about the plot,
which is best discovered page by page, but concerns Eric Cash,
a 35-year-old restaurant worker with “no particular talent
or skill, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill”
and whose “unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting
to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read
a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly
by those his age or younger, without wanting to run face-first
into a wall.” There is a murder, at which Eric appears to
be a witness, and then he becomes central to the police case;
and the police are central to everything else. They serve as a
nexus for the web of social groups which make up the Manhattan
of the book, the overlapping - if not unifying - factor in the
fields of humanity all pulling in different directions. Price’s
presentation of the city in this way reminded me of Martin Amis’s
London Fields.
The story then takes off in different directions,
and at every stage the motivations and actions of characters seem
thoroughly backed up by their psychology. Highlights of this include
Eric’s transformation in the eyes of his colleagues at the
restaurant, the splintering of the relationship between the murder
victim’s father and his wife (the portrayal of Billy Marcus
is masterly), and investigating officer Sergeant Matty Clark,
who has his own problems with his sons. Power - father-son, police-suspect,
media-public - is a theme throughout Lush Life. Clark reflects
at one point:
He had known cops who had
on occasion slept with witnesses, slept with suspected perps,
confirmed perps, slept with the wives, sisters, and mothers
of victims, and had even slept with the victims themselves if
they recovered. You walk into lives abruptly turned inside out
by the arbitrary malice of the world, and you, in your suit
and tie, your heavy black shoes, your decent haircut, and your
air of seriousness, you become the knight, the father, the protector…
A murder story has an inbuilt structure to it, which
might seem like an easy way for a writer to get himself a book
done: here’s the bones, just add meat. There is no doubt
that Richard Price makes it look easy - that immersive world,
the killer dialogue - but given that he took five years to write
Lush Life, we can conclude that it was not the result of any easy
cheat but of long hard work. Near the beginning of the book, and
the beginning of the investigation, we have this:
Every cop was on the scene,
every Night Watch, every plainclothes and uniform, was either
on a cell phone calling in, calling out, calling up, or else
feeding each other’s steno pad; Matty always taken by
that, how you could literally see the narrative building right
before your eyes in a cross-chorus of data: names, times, actions,
quotes, addresses, phone number, run numbers, shield numbers.
That is Price’s gift: he lets us see how it
all happens, line by line and scene by scene, “building
right before your eyes,” but the achievement at the end,
the view from the top, still seems entirely miraculous.
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
I
seem to have a last-come, first-served approach
to my reading. Despite the giddy piles of unread books littering
my home, the arrival of a new title always brings with it a sense
of urgency and importance. Indeed, I already had a Richard Price
novel in those piles - his last, 2003’s Samaritan
- and had been aware of lavish praise for his books for some years
(Clockers, his 1992 novel, is seemingly the granddaddy
of them all). Nonetheless, when I received this handsome hefty
new hardback, I knew I was lost.