My vacation reading - part one: Price
By Tom Teicholz at 7 April, 2008, 8:44 pm
As for my vacation reading,,,,
I finally finished Richard Price’s “Lush Life.” I’ve been hyping the book and excited to read it, and I will say that in many ways it lives up to my expectations. BUT — you knew a BUT was coming.
First the good: Price is unsurpassed in his ability to write and move the story along a certain groove, as well as the amount of information he creates and conveys as he leads the reader through a neighborhood and builds his story.
Price’s natural ability with dialogue has been honed in this book to an artform — In this week’s New Yorker critic James Woods has a good essay about Price’s unrivalled abilities with dialogue. Price also managed to finesse the ending — the story builds towards a climax and then delivers a surprise from left field that adds an unexpected note of grace to the novel — I liked that.
I also felt that Price successfully conveyed the frustration an older person who has not achieved his dreams feels having to listen to the raging optimism of successive waves of younger talent (some of whom may indeed succeed where he has not).
– I know you’re waiting for the BUT — here it comes — BUT at the end of lush life, I felt something was missing.
Price is sometimes compared to Dickens, Zola, Balzac and other 19th century novelists who went into the field and brought back sociological accounts of the highest and lowest strata of the societies in which they lived. The comparison is valid, but in those novels the characters’ conflicts add meaning to the portrait of society. Price accomplished that in “Clockers,” but here I felt he was hiding out.
Price uses the police procedural
crime thriller genre as a spine for his book, but in some ways I felt
that the police aspect was an avoidance. Where were the ghosts of the
lower east side that Price claimed his main character was writing about
– where was the neshama – the soul of his characters. It is one thing for successive generations to assimilate without any consciousness of the past, or of their own past — it is another thing for Price to have characters, Rabbis even, who display no genuine connection to where they come from or who they are.
In one scene the main character takes someone down to the basement to show them markings that are present in a Jacob Riis photo. The other person is non-plussed. Maybe that is Price’s point: no one cares anymore.
But still, I wasn’t convinced what Price cared about. What was the take-away?
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