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Friday 5 December 2008

Lush Life

A master at work

Sam Leith on Richard Price's new novel

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, bit- part 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.

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