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Lush Life: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy Used: $5.00
You Save: $21.00 (81%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  162 reviews
Sales Rank: 2876
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
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
Condition: General wear; may have minor defects; mostly close to VG
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Amazon.com Review
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 157 more reviews...
Worthwhile Read Despite Loss of Story/Plot Momentum November 20, 2008
I have always been impressed with Richard Price's novels and his ability to wow both literary critics and fans of crime fiction. _Lush Life_ starts out as strong as anything I have ever read by Price. As in the past, Price demonstrates himself as a master of dialogue and detail that have made him such a respected author in a often neglected genre. He had me hooked up until the middle of the book, all of which I read in one sitting way past when I should have gone to sleep. However, once a certain conflict is resolved (anyone who reads the book will know what I am talking about), the story seems to lose speed rapidly and devolve into a mere recitation of events rather than a well told tale.
Even though the plot seems to slow down midway through, Price is still able to use the characters and their actions as an examination of the people and history that make up life in a modern American city--or in this case a small area of a city. So, despite this not being Price's best novel, I still found it thoroughly enjoyable and would recommend it to anyone interested in reading an intelligent crime novel that is more than just a well paced page-turner.
 Hard to get into October 28, 2008
I'm having a really hard time trying to figure out where he's going with the plot. There are too many characters to keep up with and it drags on and on and on.
 cool talk, not that much to say October 4, 2008
As a first-time reader of Richard Price, his rippling dialog was certainly the highlight. His story is a vehicle for talk, not for mystery and plot twists. Some scenes are so crisp and brisk, done almost entirely through dialog.
We know who committed the crime early, and the incident isn't much of one on which to hang a story. Instead, we go behind the scenes for police process and for character development of the main detective, the parents of the victim, and assorted others. From a safe perch in suburbia, contemplation of street life in turbulent city neighborhoods can be quite entertaining in the hands of a guy like Mr. Price.
With no real mystery or surprises of any magnitude, the story eventually loses momentum, given that the characters are not that interesting and some relatively superfluous subplots sap some energy. Billy Marcus and Boulware were rather tedious and caused me to skim some sections.
Tristan was a freshly drawn character and perhaps could have been developed further.
TOUCHING THE LOST SOULS September 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I knew that Richard Price was a writer of note, but I had not been enticed enough in the past to read his work. Well, once Lush Life arrived, I couldn't put it down. Every chance I got, I'd grab another 5-7 pages. One Saturday, I read Lush Life for 3 hours straight and loved it. You are just sucked into this story.
Price is a master at getting into the 'nitty gritty' of his characters. They're all truly lost souls, but we learn such compassion for them and garner a sense of what makes them tick. Price really writes so well - you can almost smell the air in the room and the adrenaline pumping through the characters' bodies...It's comtemporary; it's heart-wrenching; it's too true. Loved it!
 Lush and Lengthy September 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found myself in the last 125 or so pages skimming the text, just wanting to finish the story, but no longer interested enough in the characters to read carefully. This is not a good sign. Price has a nice sense of the setting but, really, there isn't enough of a story, and what's there isn't interestng enough, to justify the book's 450 pages. The quirky style is a question of taste; I rather like it but I could see it beginning to annoy less patient readers. Other, more genre-oriented writers -- Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosely -- do this sort of thing better, with more focus and discipline.
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