Lush Life: A Novel

Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price

Lush Life: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Richard Price
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-04
ISBN: 0374299250
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Book Reviews of Lush Life: A Novel

Book Review: A detective story without much intrigue
Summary: 2 Stars

Somehow I had the wrong idea about this book. I thought it was more contemporary literature offering interesting character studies and perspectives on urban life. In fact, it is really just a detective story without any intriguing questions about what happened or what will happen (most of the book is based on the perspective of one detective, Matty Clark, and you learn all the details of the featured crime up front--for some reason I had the impression from the blurbs that it was more about people in the community, not primarily the police). The story is gussied up quite a bit with elaborate details, but those details seemed to me like a familiar relaying of stereotypes about New York. The type of perspective on New York that subtly criticizes the city as a way of glorfying it, reinforcing NYC narcissism by highlighting it and trying to make it seem really interesting.

So I'll admit that my low rating of this book is partially because I felt misled as to what it was about. That was probably my fault for not looking into it more carefully. I'd also note that the book was reasonably readable considering that there was nothing about the story to really figure out. Richard Price is an author that comes up a lot in contemporary culture, and I am glad to get more familiar with his writing so I have it as a point of reference. The book was not terrible, just mostly forgettable.

Summary of Lush Life: A Novel

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

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