Richard Price is a novelist of big city life, an expert dramatist who throws the voices of New Yorkers from the suburbs, the Projects and the last holdout immigrant pockets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
His new novel, Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is that uncommon thing, a mix of high and low, of remarkable literary style and street savvy. It is also up-to-date, detailing recent events like the bizarre collapse of a century-old synagogue roof. Aspects of the novel may remind readers of the sharp-edged dialogue Price writes for the TV miniseries The Wire. His dialogue is eminently playable, and it raises in the reader an unusual urge to reread scenes immediately and sink deeper into the peculiarities, the tension, the care with which his characters’ talk is rendered.
Lush Life opens with a chance encounter, late at night on Eldridge Street, which ends in murder. Police attention turns to a hapless would-be screenwriter-cum-restaurant manager named Eric Cash who thinks of himself this way: “He was an upstate Jew five generations removed from here, but he knew where he was, he got the joke; the laboratorio del gelati, the Tibetan hat boutiques, 88 Forsyth House with its historically restored cold-water flats not all that much different from the unrestored tenements that surrounded it.”
Cash is not the stereotypic Lower Manhattan striver. He recognizes the new energies and trends that give his part of Manhattan “its nowness, its right here and nowness,” but he is also aware that upon first moving to the Lower East Side he was “seized with the notion” of its being haunted by “traces of the 19-century Yiddish boomtown.”
Cash winds up a dupe in the unwinding of the novel’s crime investigation, a punishing effort by two reasonably well-meaning cops to break him down in order to get a confession. The outcome of this treatment is an overall personal collapse, as Cash is shunned by friends and abandoned to weather the storm of nasty TV and newspaper coverage of the crime. For the reader, Cash proves an adept guide through the ironies of changing New York. He straddles two worlds – one informed by the past, the other filled with businessmen on the make and would-be art bohemians – and he’s weary enough with his own pursuits to find that “even on a sun-splashed October morning like this, all of this ethnohistorical mix ’n’ match was, much like himself, getting old.”
There is no nostalgia in Lush Life. Price’s portraits of Jewish ghosts all relate to contemporary lives, architectural trends, and the broader picture he means to convey regarding how certain New York neighbourhoods welcome wave after wave of immigrants. Walking the edges of the novel’s crime scene are largely mute Chinese newcomers, mistrustful of any contact with the police, sleeping on bunks rented by the week in communal walk-ups reminiscent of the places early Italian and Jewish families staked out a hundred years before on Mott or Mulberry Street.
As the police close in, almost haphazardly, on the real murderer, Price’s narrative moves ever more intimately into the downtown Projects where the killer lives. These scenes are American in a new way, delineating gang life and the hip-hop attitude of youth who present an exotic alternative to both mainstream urban life and the city’s immigrant past. They are the New Yorkers whose travails and culture have replaced what Price calls the “evicted ghosts – pauperish tenants, greenhorn parishioners” of immigrant New York. Oddly enough, it is the police who create a link between one closed-off part of downtown life with its neighbours.
For Price, the tried-and-true genre of police procedural is a source of suspense, violent confrontation and hard-bitten characters who ooze professional and personal defeat. But Lush Life breaks with that genre through its smart and subtle infusion of history, shifting cultural trends and a darkly philosophical view of big city life. It is a book whose pleasures are many and varied.
Norman Ravvin’s books include the novel Lola by Night and A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory. He is chair of Concordia University’s Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies.