Okay, so I start off reading this book, LUSH LIFE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008) by Richard Price, and right off, it's looking like a throwback to James Ellroy. Four cops in some kind faux taxi, all talking in clipped sentences, words blatting like from a squawk box in a squad car, surveying the street scene, looking for the lucky collar to wander along and what-not.
Next thing I know, I'm reading about this failed actor named Eric, who works in a deli called Berkmann's and seems like a nice (if disgruntled) guy. He goes in to work and sees this huge line of people blocking the entrance to Berkmann's, waiting to have a look at an image of the Virgin Mary on the door of a refrigerated unit in some convenience store down the street. Eric hooks up with a new bartender at Berkmann's, a guy named Ike, who proceeds to go see the image with Eric, then wipes it out by just opening the door.
Meanwhile, a couple of neighborhood homies from the projects are planning some kind of bad business--Little Dap, the more experienced one and Tristan, the newbie who wants to step up to the challenge and who ends up carrying the gun.
All this is told with a great deal of detail and loving description of the neighborhood, of Eric's disappointment at still working at the deli instead of acting and with an absent girlfriend who makes a study of kinky sex toys and practices, who's off on one of her frequent business trips, plus the scene inside and outside Berkmann's, interspersed with the plottings of the two homies. And that's where you are by page 32.
So I'm starting to wonder, where's this going, do I even like this book, with its intricate description of place and mental process, with it's occasional run-on sentences and close study of character? It's not what I usually read, but it's interesting and there's a promise of something coming, though at this point, I'm still not sure exactly what.
Then--BAM!--it happens. The thing I've been waiting for. The event that changes everything. The hook that digs in deep and won't let go. And I keep reading.
To say much more about the story would be telling, so I'll only say this. LUSH LIFE creeps up on you like an addiction. It hooks you and keeps you reading with its suspenseful presentation of a murder and its effect on the detectives investigating it and the hapless survivors (both of the crime itself and relatives of the victim), as well as the deeds and thoughts of the perpetrator in the crime's aftermath. The prose is lush (and I mean that in the nicest way), but the dialogue is spare and rings true, like the best Elmore Leonard). The description of New York is dead-on (as is the characters' inner dialogue), the plot is complex, but well-structured, and the suspense as to whether the bad guy will ever get caught just about kills you.
It's a great read. What more can I say?
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