A criminal mind

Lush Life

By Richard Price

455 pages

Available at National Book Store

Crime is in Richard Price’s blood. The novelist who explored crack dealing in Clockers and uptown/downtown Manhattan mischief in his latest, Lush Life, knows all about the dirty little schemes, petty motives and fractured foibles of the criminal mind. No wonder he writes for TV’s The Wire: Price has an ear perfectly tuned to every lie, stammer, Brooklyn-ese utterance and deadpan delivery.

Lush Life reads like the ink’s still wet, like it’s the late-edition news. Price has always had this ability to render believable dialogue, even when working for Hollywood (scripts like Sea of Love and even Mad Dog and Glory had his trademark touches). That he may in real life be nothing like the lowlifes and losers he loves to portray in fiction is okay, too; as long as he gets to ride along with the cops and take notes, the Brooklyn novelist will never lack flavah.

There’s question as to where Price’s work sits in the literary world. Sure, it’s Crime Fiction, and even makes the best-seller lists. Maybe not in the High Literary category, since genre fiction (like crime) still doesn’t receive the accolades of, say, Don DeLillo or Ian McEwan.

But Price has got certain peculiarities in his writing, things in his rhythm that place him higher than the average professional page-turner, and above the potboiler crime fiction circuit; he’s like Jeff Beck, the original weirdo guitar slinger, amid a field of clockwork Eric Claptons.

Lush Life jumps back and forth, tracking three subgroups: the Quality of Life Task Force, a group of undercover cops prowling the streets after midnight in a fake cab; Eric Cash, one of New York City’s millions of disgruntled “hyphenates” (in this case, bar manager/would-be screenwriter); and detective Matty Clark, a brawny Irish cop who investigates what could be a simple random shooting but begins to look more and more like something else.

At 4:00 a.m., the first to come on the scene were Detective Lugo’s Quality of Lifers on the back end of a double shift, still honeycombing the neighborhood in their bogus taxi. What they saw in that limbo-hour stillness were two bodies, eyes to the sky, directly below a streetlight in front of 27 Eldridge Street, an old six-story walk-up.

As they cautiously stepped from the cab to investigate, a wild-eyed white man suddenly came charging out of the building towards them, something silver in his right hand.

Price has got the straight police-blotter details down pat, but where he excels is the character tics, like Detective Clark’s slow-boil rage against his “cockroach” superiors who dwell in offices that are “all teak, hush, and power.” He’s got a gallery of ethnic characters making up his beat — everyone from gang-bangers and Jewish students to Latino detectives (Yolanda, Clark’s partner) and Chinese-American patrolmen — but they never slip into caricature: Price (who is Jewish) knows enough about street-level banter to have them all stream racist epithets at one another as a form of in-your-face greeting, just as a way of stepping up. He also writes some of the funniest street dialogue this side of Spike Lee.

Like the projects teeming with crack dealers in Clockers, the version of Manhattan that Price creates in Lush Life is half reality, half Panavision cinema show, but there’s no denying his way with a story. He winds the prose up into a hectic frenzy at times, like he’s got to get this story off his chest. Casual readers may struggle to put all the pieces together in the first 70 pages or so, but after that, Price pulls them right in, and never lets go.

Class struggle is one of the themes of Lush Life, but it’s a subtle message, delivered in the disparity between a thousand different ethnic lifestyles that make up NYC living. It’s the kind of New York where detectives take the time to dispense unofficial (and funny) parental advice to teens as they scan through “known offender” photos:

“I’m gonna punch up six faces at a time,” Yolanda said after she got the kid seated in front of the screen. “You don’t recognize anybody, just say no and we’ll move on. OK?”

Irma ripped open a bag of Cheetos. “OK.”

Yolanda brought up the first array.

“No,” Irma said, blindly bringing the Cheetos from her lap to her mouth. The screen went gray, read PLEASE WAIT.

“You come from a nice family,” Yolanda said.

Six new faces popped up.

“No.”

“All boys are liars, you know that, right?”

Another PLEASE WAIT, another set of six.

“No.”

“You’re pretty, but smart is better.”

“No.”

“You cut out of school a lot?”

“No.” Then, “No.”

“Don’t ever let a guy you just met hand you a drink.”

“No.”

“You use protection?”

“No.” Then looking at Yolanda for the first time. “What?”

“Don’t wind up a pregnant stereotype, your poor grandmother gets stuck taking care of your kids too.”

“Him.”

“What?”

“Him.” Pointing. “True Life.”

Yolanda read the printout: “Shawn Tucker, aka Blue Light.”

The disparity between easy street and sleazy street is felt in the “gentrified” parts of the Lower East Side, where bars like Café Berkmann serve flavor-of-the-month cocktails to slumming yuppies, the kind of place where every bartender is “really a writer,” while across the street dilapidated brownstones and undercover cruisers complete the scene. Tension is never far from the surface, but in Price’s world, the cops, never far from fallen angels themselves, manage to keep sweeping up the mess, night after night.

Because Lush Life really is a night novel, charting the bad luck and bad choices that befall people after the sun goes down, and the hours begin their slow, time-bomb ticking.

Price has been a key to making The Wire one of the most authentic cop shows on TV (he’s credited by one reviewer as being “the only white guy who sounds okay using the phrase ‘True dat’”), and Lush Life has a bit of Hollywood shimmer to it: you can practically see this stuff being played out in a movie. (There’s even a bit of business about Colin Farrell, an in-joke that this reader was not privy to; perhaps Price envisions him playing the Irish detective somewhere down the line.) But as in his previous novels, Lush Life takes a well-worn genre and injects it with his own crazy energy, something you can’t buy off the street; you have to absorb it, breathe it in, and breathe it back out again on the page. True dat.