There’s something Dostoevskian about Richard
Price’s writing for his way of ensnaring a whole atmosphere
and richly turning it into an authentic aesthetic environment. He
captures Lower East Side New York just as Dostoevsky does for St.
Petersburg, with a full set of tensions and passions, blazing and
smoldering, all full of life. And while Price lacks
Dostoevsky’s all-too-Russian tendency to throw prose economy
out the window, the effect is just the same: this writing may floor
you, and you might not want it to end.

The plot centers on the shooting of bartender Ike Marcus and the
investigation of restaurant manager Eric Cash. Ike is a
twenty-something writer-to-be/waiter whose artistic and cultural
ambition comes off as doggedly annoying to Cash, who is Ike 10
years crustier and later, struggling to accept the denouement of
his writing career, which --- as for so many young, hip, New York
pseudo-literati --- failed before it began. As the investigation
trudges on, Price uproots the political and socio-economic history
and tensions of the neighborhood, and expands his lens to include
an impressive and exciting array of characters and subplots.

There are three characteristics in LUSH LIFE that make it an
amazing accomplishment. The first, it goes without saying, is the
dialogue, which may be the best you’ve ever read or heard. If
one has heard anything about Price, it’s his virtuosic
capacity for dialogue. Cops, hipsters, recovering hipsters, ethnic
populations and every other supporting cast member sound crystal
clear, saying just as much with the style of their speech as their
content.

The second is his flair for tension. On the most basic level, the
neighborhood is experiencing the clash of young, white
gentrification, which seeks to push out the local ethnic
communities enough to feel safe at night but not so much as to feel
like midtown (though for some that may not be far enough). This
modern arrangement sharply clashes with the Jewish-tenement history
of the area (one man has converted a de-sanctified synagogue into
his house --- but has another house for sleeping in). The hipsters
are at war with themselves in an arms race for authenticity, which
only pantomimes their fakery.

On a formal level, Price uses many of the alluring conventions of
typical crime fiction, complete with a male-female cop duo that is
actually original and interesting, while resisting the pull of
trite genre fiction. And on a more individual scale, the lush
characters of this novel are full of interpersonal tensions, and
most of them are conflicted souls themselves. Price shows both
sides of these stories but is more or less unforgiving as he paints
few truly admirable characters and fewer heroes. But this
isn’t take-no-prisoners vigilante writing. There is a supple
humanity in each of these souls, and while there is little heroism
here, there’s also little villainy.

Price’s third gift is his ability to construct a city in
letters. When reading LUSH LIFE, one feels transported into the
thick of the Lower East Side’s ugliness and beauty. This
novel is endlessly expansive, and for every major plot line, there
is enough character complexity and hidden narratives that demand
one turns back and explores the side streets. A third of the way
through, the more poetic writing slips away, but before
disappointment sets in, this plot sculpted into a whole world
invites the reader into its clutches. Good luck letting go; you may
not wish to.

The appeal of this book is the appeal of New York itself: its
beauty, its ugliness, the beauty from that ugliness, the constant
change and destruction, overturning of the present that conjures
ghosts from the past. Price says it best: “what really drew
him to the area wasn’t its full-circle irony but its nowness,
its right here and nowness, which spoke to the true engine of his
being, a craving for it made many times worse by a complete
ignorance of how this ‘it’ would manifest
itself.” LUSH LIFE destroys temporality, meshing past,
present and the hopes and fears of the future. In doing so, it
stretches into an infinite complexity that vibrantly photographs
the landscape of our contemporary urban cultural
consciousness.