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Review: 'Lush Life' by Richard Price

BY CHARLES TAYLOR | Bloomberg News

March 23, 2008

LUSH LIFE, by Richard Price. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 455 pp., $26.

A mugging gone violently wrong is at the center of Richard Price's new novel, "Lush Life." Scraping the spick-and-span surface of the "new" New York to get at the grit beneath, Price traces the

slowly converging tracks

of the killer, the police

and the victims they leave behind.

The protagonist (heroes are in short supply in Price's fiction) is Eric Cash, the prototypical failed actor working as a waiter at a fashionable Lower East Side cafe. A booze-

fueled evening out with a young bartender whose easy charm stoked Cash's envy ends with an attempted mugging, a death and Cash as the suspect.

Cash is identified by witnesses and interrogated by two cops whose blind persistence threatens to stop them from catching the real killer.

Ever since "Clockers" (1992), with its depiction of crack-era New York, Price has been writing a social anatomy of the city. To him, New York is a place where the spruced-up surfaces and gentrified neighborhoods mask the same old problems. Crime has dropped, but now tourists are less likely to be mugged than Chinese deliverymen who are paid in cash. And there's still a pervasive sense of hopelessness among the city's poor, particularly the African-American poor.

The title "Lush Life" is an ironic nod to Billy Strayhorn's wonderful jazz standard. Price means it to refer to New York's current prosperity. The mood of the book, though, could be summed up by another song title, this one from the pre-Rudolph Giuliani era: "Don't Believe the Hype."

Price doesn't think New York's changes have all been for the bad. Better a restaurant occupying a space than a crack house. But he knows that gentrification has swept away many safe and stable, if not flashy, lives along with the crime and blight. Implicit in the book is his vision of a New York that has room for none but the rich, or tourists who'll find it much like everyplace else.

Price's ear and his reporter's instincts continue to be first-rate. But "Lush Life" feels sluggish. Neither the cops, motivated less by a sense of justice than by an us-against-them attitude - and so obviously on to the wrong man - nor Eric Cash, a blob of resentment and disappointment, are interesting or sympathetic enough to hold us for 455 pages.

"Lush Life" lacks the urgency and scope of "Clockers" or the book that followed, "Freedomland." Price's previous urban epics sang. "Lush Life" doesn't keep the beat.