Local Book Reviews
Lush Life by Richard Price
By Fritz EskerLush Life
By Richard Price
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Reviewed by Fritz Esker
Lush Life takes place in New York’s Lower East Side, where struggling young artists and trendy clubs reside next to poverty-stricken housing projects. One night, a young bartender is killed in an apparent robbery gone wrong. However, the cops suspect that the victim’s co-worker (who was with him during the shooting) is lying about something.
The first 100 pages of Lush Life is a mystery, similar to Price’s earlier novels (Clockers, Freedomland) where a seemingly cut-and-dry case has more to it than meets the eye. However, any mystery about who did it and why is resolved less than a third of the way through the novel. What Lush Life is really about is the effects an act of violence has on the victim’s family, the bystanders, the cops, the killer, and the community itself.
And this is what makes Price special as a novelist (he’s also an accomplished screenwriter and he was a writer on HBO’s landmark series The Wire). Make no mistake about it, he tells a good story with a well-thought out plot, but his stories are always inhabited by three-dimensional, fully fleshed-out characters that elevate his work over average genre novels.
Price isn’t a prolific novelist (his last novel, the excellent Samaritan, was released in early 2003), but his novels are always worth the wait.