Voices of New York

Lush Life a novel by Richard Price.  Picador.  455 pp.  $15.00 ****

Two guys from the projects in New York, Little Dap and Tristan, have a scheme to make money.  They’ll go out late and mug some bar hoppers in the East Village to get cash, go uptown and buy cocaine in quantity, come back, divide it up, and sell it on the street.  They see a clear profit for each of them.  Little Dap is more experienced, so he gets Tristan to hold the gun (partly because he doesn’t want to be found with it).  Tristan hasn’t done this before, but it doesn’t sound hard.  He could use some cash.

The evening goes slowly, but in the wee hours of the morning they come upon three white guys, one so drunk the other two hold him up.  The first guy hands over his wallet, the second is so drunk he collapses, but the third—who seems full of bravado—says “Not tonight, my man,” and steps toward Tristan in a way that might have seemed threatening.  In a moment of fear Tristan shoots him, and he and Little Dap take off.  The victim, named Ike, has died by the time the cops get there.

Out of that single incident Richard Price has spun a novel of 455 pages that moves at a furious pace, is composed mostly of dialogue and is absolutely thrilling.  It never lapses for a moment.  It’s an astonishing performance.

Price is my rough contemporary, one year younger, and I’d never read him before, partly because I didn’t know where to start and partly, I think, because I envied him.  He’s had the kind of career I might have wished for.  I hadn’t read his books but had seen movies he wrote, The Color of Money, Sea of Love, Mad Dog and Glory.  He was also one of the writers on The Wire, perhaps his most famous credit.  But I have to say, despite my envy, that the man deserves all the acclaim he’s gotten.  He’s not only a superb writer of dialogue, but in Lush Life creates a novel with a huge cast, an intricate plot, and never loses the reader.  We don’t even get confused.  In a way it’s a tour de force.  But it’s massive, and intricate.

We start off hearing Little Dap and Tristan talk (in street argot so full of idioms that I could barely understand), but then move on to the guys they would later rob; the two cops—a man and a woman—who would eventually, after much agony, crack the case; a bunch of cops going after drugs who were eventually important in finding the killer; the father and adopted mother of the murder victim; the children of one of the detectives.  A whole small world inhabits this novel, which is really just about a mugging that went awry, a kid from the projects who was trying to be tough but got scared, a victim who was taking on New York as an actor and had too much bravado, also too much to drink.  All of these people are fascinating.

None moreso perhaps than Matty, the lead detective (though every bit as important is his partner Yolanda, who grew up in the projects and is expert at interrogating criminals.  She’s the good cop; he’s the bad).  He makes the initial mistake of taking too seriously the report of eyewitnesses, who didn’t see the two muggers approach, only saw three men, and believed the first guy—the one who claimed to have turned over his wallet—to have killed his buddy.  It is only after 24 hours that Matty realizes his eyewitnesses were themselves having an argument and weren’t paying attention to what was happening; they weren’t observant anyway.  By the time he gets back on track he’s lost valuable time.

The second most memorable character, at least to my mind, is the father of the murder victim, a man named Billy who had abandoned his marriage, and his son, years before.  The grief of that man, and his erratic behavior, are both a help and hindrance to Matty, though they’re also just a fact of what he’s dealing with.  We don’t often think of the family of the crime victim.  But this crime shatters a family, and leave the victim’s father bereft.

As intricate as the plot of this novel is, I would say it’s not plot-focused—though the suspense about whether or not the cops will find the killer is overwhelming; often their task seems impossible—but about characters, all of them flawed human beings, all of them leading a rather lush life (if that expression refers to drinking), all of them a small part of life in New York.  This novel will stay with me long after I’ve finished.