Lush Lit

Clockers author sues for justice on the streets of Gotham

By James Walling

Richard Price is one of the strongest literary voices working today, and the release of his eighth and most recent novel, Lush Life, has been heralded as a cultural event in a way generally reserved for so-called "serious" novelists, essayists and other more celebrated purveyors of postmodern pyrotechnics.

But there's nothing postmodern about Price's writing.

His previous novels (most notably 1992's Clockers, which the author adapted along with director Spike Lee into an Academy Award-nominated screenplay) fall firmly into the largely bastardized genre of the hardboiled crime/suspense novel.

Like other successful practitioners of the dark arts - noir fiction - Price is praised for the sociological realism of his settings,his moody atmosphere and the supposedly plot-driven purity of his stories.

Lush Life is broad in scope and rich in descriptive detail. Price is well-known for the complexity of his characters,and he has a pitch-perfect ear for capturing the various dialects of the street.

Bleak, deeply cynical, and often unbearably sad, Lush Life exhibits flights of poetic fancy that punctuate the documentary-like realism of the dialogue with decorative literary flourishes and flashes of psychological insight.

For instance, one young villain, Tristan, intones snippets of verse like some sort of modern day Beat versifier:

"A man stands down
sits tight when it's right
My no
is a blow
to your yes..."

And the legions of aspiring actors, writers and artists invading the steadily gentrifying neighborhoods in Price's book have their bards and balladists too, just as their elders and betters have their representative prophets and oracles to guide them along.

"The Latinos? The Chinese? The ones been living here since the Flood..." begins one restaurant owner, "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."

Generally speaking, however, Price's prose is journalistically flat and thick with precise urban slang and obscure lingo.

The author's talent for churning out realistic and captivating dialogue was on full display in his work on the brilliant HBO series The Wire, which completed its celebrated five-year run this year.

The troubling characters and cynical outlook at work in Lush Life will come as no surprise to those familiar with the bleak-as-a-cold-Monday-morning point of view of The Wire.

Despite the widely varying circumstances of the striving multitudes portrayed by Price, each character - from the lowliest hustler or addict to the most world weary and jaded police detective - is full, complete, well-rounded and motivated by those universal characteristics of the human condition: greed, sloth, envy, wrath and pride, et al.

In fact, an alternate title for the novel could have easily been The Seven Deadly Sins, except that their presence in Price's New York is so ubiquitous that they soon become about as ambient as white noise.

The plot centers on that most distressingly ordinary of big city tragedies - a mugging gone wrong.

A couple of desperate kids from the projects attempt to hold up a trio of "La Bohemers" (Price's caustic label for tragically hip East Side gentrifiers) as they make their way home from a long, alcohol-soaked night on the town.

When one of the revelers displays an irrational confrontational streak - irrational, considering the fact that their assailants are armed and obviously dangerous - he is murdered at point blank range.

The narrative is chiefly concerned with the circumstances leading up to this cataclysmic event and the various characters' attempts to cope with the consequences of such a seemingly senseless act of violence as the dust begins to settle in their respective lives.

There really isn't a hero - or even an anti-hero - but if the book can be said to be written from any one character's point of view, it is that of Eric Cash, a disenchanted restaurant manager modeled in part on the author. Cash has yet to achieve meaningful artistic success, unlike his famous progenitor, and he is on the brink of giving up his dreams. Price recently proclaimed, "He [Cash] is me if what has been hadn't been."

Cash narrowly dodges a bullet (literally) on the fateful occasion of the mugging and spends the better part of the novel attempting unsuccessfully to recover from the psychic trauma of keeping close company with violent death.

The story's muse is Yolanda, a female detective raised in the hells of the city's housing projects, whose penchant for empathy allows her to diagnose, provide succor to, and, as often as not, manipulate the panoply of cops, criminal suspects and victims of violent crime that surround her.

In the end, no one escapes untouched by the interplay of violence and justice in the pages of Lush Life, and few (if any) characters become the beneficiaries of anything remotely recognizable as redemption.

Setting plot machinations aside, the novel is intensely and intrinsically thematic.

Price's themes ("crime doesn't pay," "revenge is bittersweet,") wend their way throughout the book, and the basic truths of "original sin" are prominent, omnipresent and deftly handled.

Never so much as a whiff of sentimentality is allowed to invade Price's world. Perhaps this goes some distance towards explaining why the critical establishment has welcomed an unapologetic genre writer such as Price with open arms.

Lush Life stormed no less a bastion of sophistication than the cover of The New York Times Book Review, and such plaudits appear to be par for the course.

Price has repeatedly been likened to Dickens for his focus on the plight of the urban poor and the diversity and complexity of his characterizations.

Perhaps an idea that is more to the point is the notion held by an ever-increasing minority of critics and readers that genre fiction is the modern heir to the Victorian novel - placing it right at the beating heart of our canonical literary tradition - despite its having been shunted to the edges of the mainstream during successive generations of literary elitists and snobbish intellectuals.

As long as highbrow literary criticism continues to give short shrift to the practitioners of genre fiction, the release of a new book by a writer like Price is a breath of fresh air; or, as Price might put it himself - a cool breeze through the Holland Tunnel.