A master at work

Sam Leith

LUSH LIFE by Richard Price Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp. 455, ISBN 9780747596011 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 It’s pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you’re in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive. Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and written sentence by sentence without a false note or a moment of drag.

In the opening chapter we are introduced to the ‘Quality of Life Task Force’ — a team of four undercover cops ‘in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run’. As the figure of speech suggests, they’re fishing — random car-stops, hoping to pull guns, dope, knives. They are, not that we’re to know it yet, bitpart players; but they give Price the opportunity to establish his scene and his scope.

The description of how they patrol, in a single long paragraph, at once recalls and dispatches the sort of poetic, consciously virtuosic coast-to-coast panning shot that opens Rick Moody’s The Diviners. This is about the local. And this is — like the Lower East Side of Manhattan and like proper police work — a bare accumulation of facts on the ground:

Restless, they finally pull out to honeycomb the narrow streets for an hour of endless tight right turns: falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, creperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Boulangerie, bar, hat boutique, corner. Iglesia, gelateria, matzo shop, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school, People’s Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Lady Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service, corner. And then finally, on a sooty stretch of Eldridge, something with potential: a weary-faced Fujianese in a thin Members Only windbreaker, cigarette hanging, plastic bags dangling from crooked fingers like full waterbuckets, trudging up the dark, narrow street followed by a limping black kid half a block behind.

That’s as craftily and audaciously stylised, both sonically and in terms of its juxtapositions, as a jazz poem — but for anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with those streets, it also evokes the thing. It tells you exactly where you are.

On the face of it, Richard Price has written a straightforward Lower-Manhattan police procedural. There are eight million stories, as the man said, in the naked city, and this is one of them. Eric Cash, a writer in his midthirties still managing a diner while he waits for his life to begin, goes drinking with the new bartender, Ike Marcus, and a friend of Ike’s. In the small hours of the morning, the three men are braced by a pair of muggers. Eric hands over his wallet. The other man passes out. Ike, young and brave and dumb, says: ‘Not tonight, my man’, and is shot dead for his pains.

It falls to Detective Matty Clark and his empathetic but tough-as-nails Latina partner Yolonda to work the case. The story doesn’t unfold through a treasure-hunt of ingeniously unfolded clues, but through cock-ups, red herrings, grunt-work and dumb luck. The denouement is more or less an accident. And then there’s the next thing. But this isn’t a whodunnit so much as a how-doesit-unfold?

Price is a writer of quite extraordinary gifts, using a police story as a probe into his real subject: the ecosystem of the city. The skeleton of this novel, as the genre demands, is its snappy dialogue — but around that, Price has built a world. Into this story, all New York flows.

If the Lower East Side is as I suggested, an ecosystem, it’s a grimy sort of coral reef, populated by all sorts of peculiar fish. Eric’s incarceration, for instance, gives Price the occasion for one of his almost Dickensian cameos:

The only ones in the cell who didn’t seem to know anybody else or join in this periodic rush to the bars were Eric and a blaze-eyed black man, slack-bellied and nuts, wearing his T-shirt around his neck like a dickey as he disjointedly paced the perimeter whispering to himself.

Price is a writer of glorious surfaces, rich information, extravagant detail. He enters the thoughts of three characters — Tristan, the accidental killer; Eric, the nearly-victim; and Matty, the cop — but what they say and do remains much more important, as far as the narrative goes, than what they think or feel.

That is not to say that Price isn’t interested in his characters’ inner lives; only that they are most effectively manifest in their actions. He is especially attuned to the way power infuses relationships: the power struggle between a parent and a teenage child; a tough guy and a wannabe; the choreographed power-exchanges of a police interrogation. The crime that gets this story going makes Tristan, for a while, a bigger man; it makes Eric, whose psychological journey is among the finest things here, a little smaller.

Price is piercingly persuasive, too, on the way characters react to stress — to unexpectedly timed eruptions of grief or rage; or, more subtly, to the little irrationalities and outbreaks of distracted vagueness that afflict the afflicted. A study in this is the victim’s father, who moves, entirely plausible, through the story like a zombie.

Price’s New York lives above all in the spring and swing of its spoken language, or languages; Yiddishisms, NuYorican slang; black patois, copspeak. He really do do the police in different voices. Lush Life’s pages are raisin-studded with unexpected lexemes. A ‘stew bum’ is likely to be found ‘zotzed’ amid the ‘last-call stagger-zoo’ outside a bar; perps ‘book’ in one direction or another after ‘juxing’ the vic; the dead are ‘pronounced’ when they arrive at the hospital. ‘Wits’ can put you in the house if they talk to ‘a police’. Children are ‘hamsters’. Money is ‘kale’ or ‘cheese’ or ‘cheddar’. ‘Stank’ is a noun. A bachelor’s awkwardly shaped apartment is a ‘three-room dumbbell’; a tenement stuffed to the rafters with illegal Chinese immigrants is ‘a boat-building’. A healthy sex life means ‘bookoo dugout’.

To list these in isolation is to ignore the verve and metrical bounce with which Price’s characters combine them: Tristan at one point watches his ex-stepfather storm out of the room, for example, ‘his equally bug-eyed mopstick skeeve of a wife bringing up the rear’.

And not everybody — a source of dry drollery — even understands each other. When Quality of Life pull someone over, they bust them for a little dope, and then pressure them (using a little fish to catch a bigger) to make some calls and see if they can find a gun. The kid says he doesn’t know where to get a gun. One of the cops, Lugo, presses him.

‘Huh . . . so like, there’s no one you could call, say, “Yo, I just got jacked in the PJs. I need me a onetime whistle, can I meet you at such and such?” ’ ‘A whistle?’ Lugo makes a finger gun.

‘You mean a hammer?’ ‘A hammer, a whistle . . .’ Lugo turns away and tightens his ponytail.

‘Pfff . . .’ The kid looks off, then, ‘I know a knife.’ Lugo laughs. ‘My mother has a knife.’

Just look how well-timed that exchange is, among other things. But misunderstanding is all over the place. A cop asks a witness: ‘The guy who throws the shot.’ (That’s a question, though with Price’s usual exactness, neither spoken nor punctuated as such.) The witness says: ‘What?’ and another cop glosses: ‘Shoots.’ One little gangsta promises another little gangsta he’ll be ‘my dolgier out there’. Later, sheepishly, he asks: ‘What the f*** is a dolgier?’ Most knowingly comical is the exchange when a drug dealer is caught by the police:

‘Holy cow there, Dap,’ Lugo said, pulling a fat wad of cash from one of Big Dap’s kneehigh basketball socks. ‘What’s the what on this?’ “I got to buy a crib,’ Big Dap murmured, looking off.

‘An apartment?’ ‘Naw, a crib. For the baby.’

So, is this the real New York? Not quite. It’s an invented New York every bit as populous. Price’s ear for dialogue isn’t a reporter’s so much as a screenwriter’s. Too many characters here speak too well, too energetically, too dramatically; what they see from the corners of their eyes is too seldom exactly humdrum. This is that inflated, life-plus50-per-cent version of realism that at once captures its original and builds on it. There is a difference between galvanic vigour and real, breathing life. You cannot help but suspect that Price can turn this stuff out by the yard; that his ambition in this book is not, perhaps, equal to his powers.

But it’s none of my business to chide him for not writing a different book than the one he has. If anyone else thinks they can write a police procedural this good — this linguistically alive and this tough and this lushly inventive — let them by all means have a go.