Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There's a crime at the heart of the story, but you don't read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they're really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. --Tom Nissley
I am an avid reader of mysteries, paranormal and romance, with a little so-called serious fiction and non-fiction thrown in. I tried, but couldn't get into this book, so I handed it over to my husband. He very much enjoys some sci-fi, but also loved, for example, the book Homicide: Life on the Street. Lush Life seemed more in that vein.
My husband definitely gave it 4 out of 5 stars. He said that the author certainly knows how to set a scene, the dialogue is spot on, and he can make you identify with the characters - even the ones you'd prefer not to identify with.
However, he found some problems with the pacing. I quote, "It's going along fine, and then, well, it's not." Apparently the great descriptions at some points will get in the way of the actual plot.
All in all, though, he would recommend it for fans of gritty street style novels.
writes,
I had a tough time getting started with this book, and never really got into it. The first few chapters made little sense to me, and never really went anywhere. The author tried to be so hip, that the book lost focus. It seemed the author thought he was too cool to have a actual plot. He tries to write gritty, I got it, but he is over the top gritty. It got rather annoying that he was trying to be so gritty. I actually reread the first fifty or so pages to see what I had missed, but that really didn't help much. Once the story got rolling, some of the characters became a bit more three-dimensional, but I never seemed to care about any of them. The book did capture the feel of lower New York City. I kept hoping that I would get into the author's voice, but I never did.
writes,
In his latest novel Richard Price presents a roving, cinematic, psychological collage of a very specific time and place, New York's Lower East Side in the early 21st century. The urban locale, interior monologues, sarcastic title and acid-etched character studies recall Ladies Man, Price's novel of 70's New York, but Lush Life is a much more layered work, populated with a cast of distinct, believable characters in interwoven narrative arcs.
Price's dialogue is often brilliant, and his visual descriptions are vivid, at once realistic and symbolic. One can easily imagine Lush Life adapted to a TV mini-series. There are a few instances in which the reader might feel overly manipulated, when Price is a bit blatantly stacking the deck, but the novel is consistently readable, entertaining and thought-provoking.
