Lush Life: A Novel

"No matter how routinely and highly praised it may be, Price's ear for dialogue, his ability to capture and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and evanescent vocabulary of urban life, cannot be overpraised: with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best, one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature. Resorting with miraculous infrequency to the use of dialect spellings and other orthographic tricks, Price gets his characters' words to convey subtle nuances of class, occupation, education, even geographical gradations of neighborhood, while also using them as a powerful vehicle for the transmission, in fits and starts, evasions and doublings back, of their interior lives. He is a perfect magpie for slang, and like its predecessors this novel is rich in fascinating bits of law-enforcement and street-criminal argot . . . By now Price has the police procedural down cold, both in his technical knowledge of the workings of the criminal justice system and in his control over pacing and point of view, and Lush Life reads swiftly . . . His prose has never felt more fluid, his plotting is spry, and later scenes spin by in a monte-dealer whirl before you realize that you have just been had with another unlikely (or perhaps likely but no less dissatisfying) coincidence. But what is most remarkable about Lush Life, finally, is not the astuteness of its social critique. Nor is it the resemblance of the book, or of the experience of reading it, as other critics have claimed, to watching a taut policer or a season of The Wire . . . If Lush Life reads, at times, like a kind of 'Priceland,' offering up to the reader, in a tightly controlled performance, ghostly echoes of the masterpieces that preceded it, perhaps that has less to do with any fault of Price's than of the city that, in ceaselessly remaking itself, in endlessly referring to itself, betrays everyone and everything but the irony and accuracy of those Yiddish words, carved into the blackened beam of the cellar apartment, words that could easily have served as the title of this fine novel: City of Gold."—Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books

“[Prices] new novel, Lush Life, which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Prices apparently more formal, descriptive prose. Of course, the author of such novels as Clockers and Samaritan (as well as episodes for The Wire, and several movies) has done his urban homework.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

“The scenes in Lush Life are sure-footed and brisk . . . Lush Life is his funniest book yet, more overtly comedic than any that precede it . . . Lush Life is a satirical but sympathetic take on existence here at what, given the subprime mortgage fiasco and concomitant layoffs on Wall Street, may be the end of the early 21st-century economic boom.”—Maud Newton, The Boston Globe

"Lush Life is complex, nuanced, and full of convincing detail."—Stephen Aubrey, Commonweal

"Lush Life revolves around a New York City murder, exploring the crime from all sides. With his trademark urban realism and genius for dialogue, Price vividly takes us inside the world of low-level street thugs, seen-it-all police detectives, heartbroken victims, hesitant witnesses and publicity-hungry politicians. And as Price meticulously follows the murder investigation, readers see that these characters (whether thugs, cops or victims) are far more complicated and interesting than what we had expected. Lush Life is often dark, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and always gripping. Like all of Price's work, it is filled with gritty dialogue that crackles with unspoken tension and hidden meaning."—Chuck Leddy, The Writer

"Richard Price has always used setting as a character—fully fleshed out, vibrant, quirky—and in Lush Life, he may have surpassed himself. The scene is the Lower East Side of New York, with its rich history, its socioeconomic diversity, and its recent resurgence as, once again, the hip place to be. The streets pulse, as do the people who populate them—from the kids in the housing projects to the cops on the beat to the clever entrepreneurs who turn old venues into new ones that cater to those who want to see and be seen. This is novel as palimpsest, with Price limning the environs with resonant traces of what came before. Price's narrative begins with a murder, and as the search for the murderer unfolds, he reveals the pain and frustration in many lives, from the murderer's to the cop's to the families touched by the crime. Though this might bring a nod from seasoned readers of police procedurals, Price's work cannot be pigeonholed into an easy genre. He writes novels, not formula books, and when Detective Matty Clark sits down with a suspect, there is no easy way to categorize either the cop or the alleged perpetrator. Matty is as damaged in his way as is the dead young man's father, Billy Marcus, who can't fathom his son Ike's death. The straightforward and yet ultimately complex message: it's not easy being a man of any age or race in postmillennial America. It seems a little easier to be a woman, though, for in Lush Life the ideal woman may be found in Yolanda Bello, Matty Clark's partner. An unusual siren, her song is her ability to speak in an intimate, nonsexual voice to young men in the housing projects who become immediately confessional or, at the very least, trusting . . . Price has the well-deserved reputation of being the best writer of dialogue in American fiction today . . . His language is so evocative of place and character that he can startle the reader out of any complacency that might tempt assumption about characters. Lush Life is a post-9/11 novel set in a world that once believed in the eternal verities but that now has only the artifacts of those beliefs: Mary the Virgin showing up as condensation on a freezer door in a local deli, a desanctified synagogue being used as a rich man's home, and Detective Matty Clark looking 'south to the financial district, to the absence of the Towers,' It's a world we recognize viscerally, for it's the one we live in."—Rita D. Jacobs, Montclair State University, World Literature Today

"With Lush Life Richard Price has become our post-modern American Balzac. Except that he's a whole lot funnier than Balzac and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around, living or dead, American or French. He's a writer I hope my great-grandchildren will read, so they'll know what it was like to be truly alive in the early 21st century."—Russell Banks

"This is it, folks. The novel about gentrified New York, circa right now, that weve been waiting for. Richard Price understands what's happened to our beloved city, he writes dialogue like a genius, and he absolutely, genuinely cares."—Gary Shteyngart

“Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced. Wry, profane, hilarious, and tragic, sometimes in a single line, Lush Life is his masterwork. I doubt anyone will write a novel this good for a long, long time.”—Dennis Lehane