Lush Life: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  139 reviews
Sales Rank: 521
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 464
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.6
ISBN: 0374299250
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374299255
ASIN: 0374299250
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Hardback - new
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the “new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and “quality of life” squads, from a writer whose “tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 134 more reviews...
"The City of New York Was Not Finished With Him" July 8, 2008
Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Richard Price's now-bestselling Lush Life is not as much about a specific crime as it is about New York and the inhabitants of its Lower East side: cops, bartenders, wannabe actors and screenwriters, immigrants, rich kids, broken families, drug addicts, thugs, grocery store owners, the abused, and the abusers, all of them desperate. The murder of Ike Marcus is only a flashpoint. The people that the act brings to the surface define the novel through their individual stories.
Detectives Matty and Yolanda are charged with solving Ike's murder despite the inexplicable reluctance of their superiors to support the effort. Billy Marcus, Ike's father, attracts Matty's sympathy, both as a victim and as a representative of fatherhood, a role that continues to baffle Matty as he tries to deal with his wayward sons. Eric Cash, a bartender who was with Ike when he was shot, follows a downward spiral in the wake of the murder. The shooter, a formerly good kid living in low-income housing, struggles to find some control in an otherwise helpless, and hopeless, situation. Even the more minor characters have burdens that overtake their dreams.
This ambitious novel suffers at times from meandering subplots, some of which seem completely superfluous, not even adding to the larger portrait of life downtown; however, where the structure is more focused, Price shines. Stylistically, Lush Life makes demands on its readers through its sometimes unconventional prose and multiple points-of-view that skip from character to character, subplot to subplot. The result is a memorable, though fractured, portrait of the seedy side of New York.
I recommend this complex novel for Richard Price fans, readers of literary fiction, and those who want more than the usual summer fare. Skip this if you want a suspenseful, quick-read crime novel.
 What was so great? July 7, 2008
Smokey Cormier (Oakland, CA United States)
I thought it was very good at plunking you down in this particular group of settings -- different neighborhoods in NYCity. Richard Price is good at characterization. Very good at dialog. It's set in NYCity so I love that. I"m not recommending though ... the ending is a bit of a let down -- I mean the ending not the climax. I'm not sure why I say that because in many ways the ending was satisfying. In a novel, denouement is tricky ... it's a very tricky part of the book. Here's another thing: I didn't like any of the characters. That bothers me when I read.
Is it a sign of true maturity when you can really like a book even though you don't like any of the characters? Dunno. I think it's a sign of maturity when you can recognize that a writer is really good at writing even though you dislike the characters. For example, I thought the plotting and writing in Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter was really good. Really good. But I intensely disliked everyone. And, ultimately, that means I would only recommend the book with reservations. Maybe I'm being unfair ... because what if that was Porter's intention all along ... to portray these characters so that we wouldn't like them? Back to Lush Life: I'm not recommending it because the farther away from reading the book I am, I like it less and less and say to myself: yeah, so what was so great? There was something significant that was missing for me.
 Lush Life is hard to understand June 26, 2008
Beth A. Jersey (California)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I guess I live too far from the streets of New York, but I found myself really struggling to understand what half of the dialog meant in this novel. I enjoyed the pace and the different views of the same event, but every time someone spoke I had to guess what they were saying. Made it hard to really enjoy.
Gritty June 26, 2008
Paul A. Minafri (Phoenix, Arizona)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Get ready to take a tour of the underbelly of the City in this work. Gritty, shocking, at times touching, this book will keep you hooked until the last page.
Borrow this book... June 24, 2008
OBX Lover (VA USA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I can count on both hands the number of books I haven't finished in my 50 years on this earth (and believe you me I've read a LOT of books) but this one was just TOO confusing. I thought it was just me until I talked about it to my Mom and she agreed that she felt the same way. And we both LOVE books! I'm VERY glad that I borrowed the book from my local library!
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