In “Lush Life,” Richard Price’s eighth novel, the resurfacing
project that caps the same old potholes (and threatens
to collapse in
certain areas, potentially creating immense new craters capable of
swallowing small crowds) targets the tangled, once tenement-lined
streets of New York City’s Lower East Side. In Realtor-speak, the
district is “in transition,” which means in Police Department terms
that its college-educated young renting class and bonus-gorged
co-op-owning elite can still score narcotics from the old-guard locals,
whose complexions are generally darker than the new folks’, making them
easy to spot on party nights but tricky to ID in photo lineups come the
red-eyed mornings after. Keeping such bloody collisions of class and
color to an acceptably inconspicuous minimum is the job of the
so-called quality-of-life squads that
Price — a consummate
stalker-realist who seems to have written the book from stoops and
doorways; his gaze is that pathologically focused, his ear that tuned —
portrays as a nincompoop nouvelle constabulary whose stakeouts are so
light on lock-and-load moments they’d put even the Hardy Boys to sleep.
Down on newly hip Orchard and Eldridge Streets, among the exclusive
no-signage clubs and Zagat-rated
fusion eateries, what was once an authentic urban jungle has almost
themed itself out of existence, turning a lot of the cops into park
rangers.But once in a while the cooped-up cats still pounce,
tempted by so much slow-moving, pampered prey, all sodden with money
and novelty martinis. The lights go on in Price’s interrogation room
after just such an ambush.The victim — the one who lives — is
Eric Cash, in his own mind an emerging writer but known to the world as
a veteran restaurant manager. In his mid-30s, the descendant of Jewish
ghetto-dwellers who lived and died on the same city blocks where Eric
is riding out his undiscovered phase along with 20,000 other
tip-dependent would-be screenwriters, he heads out one night with two
pals into the Disneyhood and suddenly finds himself in Scorceseland. A
gun comes out, a brown finger on its trigger, and the next thing Eric
knows he’s in the ugly room recounting the mugging and murder of his
friend Ike to a female officer, Yolanda, and a more traditionally male
and Irish fellow, Matty Clark. Eric thinks he’s a witness but really
he’s a suspect, and Price provides the taut, triangular dialogue, which
at first sounds a bit like standard noir talk (Price writes for the
cable crime drama “The Wire”) but soon grows bushier, thornier and
taller in a way the screen can’t quite contain because of its
horizontal orientation but which fits with the verticality of the page
and sometimes, as the book goes on, climbs clean off it and up into the
sky.Here’s a restaurant owner, Eric’s boss, griping about the
hypersensitive neighbors who’ve been bugging him to keep the noise down
or risk the cancellation of his liquor license. “The whites. The, the
‘pioneers. ... The Latinos? The Chinese? The ones been living here
since the Flood? Couldn’t be nicer. Happy for the jobs. The thing is,
the complainers? They’re the ones that
started all this. We just follow them. Always have, always will. Come
down here, buy some smack squat from the city, do a little fix-up, have
a nice big studio, rent out the extra space, mix it up with the
ethnics, feel all good and politically righteous about yourself. But
those lofts now? Those buildings? Twenty-five hundred square feet,
fourth floor, no elevator, Orchard and Broome. Two point four mil just
last week.” If fiction writing were a fairer profession, the
price of such hearing would be blindness, but the hell of it is that
Price can also see — even in the dark and at great distances — and not
only with his ordinary two eyes but with a wider, clearer third one
that’s set between them and an inch above them. “The Clara E. Lemlich
Houses were a grubby sprawl of 50-year-old high-rises sandwiched
between two centuries. To the west, the 14-story buildings were towered
over by One Police Plaza and Verizon headquarters, massive futuristic
structures without any distinguishing features other than their blind
climbing endlessness.”Tentatively and gradually, however, fragile, improvised bonds begin
developing like laundry lines strung between apartment windowsills.
Catalyzed by a miniature crisis that means nothing in the scope of
history but everything down on the sidewalks and the streets,
detectives align themselves with victims’ families, freed suspects with
the officials who once suspected them, managers with the workers whose
tips they skim. The transient, self-serving affinities that pass for
affection just before the bars close and the showy displays of grief
that intensify when the media are around melt and trickle away over the
curbs, where they’re splashed into vapor by the trucks and cars
supplying the place with its goodies and its shoppers. There’s an
orthodox leftist sentimentality here mixed up with a certain primal
conservative yearning, but they react in solution toward the end to
form a raw and slightly unstable new compound that Price isn’t shy
about valuing higher than mere gold — which, despite its shiny,
alluring heft, ultimately weighs us down until we can only stand in
place, envious, anxious, cocky and alone.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS ONLINE - ON MY BLOG.http://workfromhomedepot.blogspot.com/2008/01/review-books-summary-abstracts.html