'Lush Life' by Richard Price
BOOK REVIEW
The novel surveys a complex urban landscape as a crime that seems simple unravels into unforeseen complications.
Lush Life
A Novel
Richard Price
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 456 pp., $26
IN the early 1990s, Richard Price made a decision to change direction in his work. Until then, he'd been an atmospheric urban novelist, the author of, among other titles, "The Wanderers," a Bronx-based coming-of-age novel set in the early 1960s, and "Ladies' Man," about a week in the life of a door-to-door salesman who's looking for love. These are self-contained books, small and character-driven, reminiscent in places of the gritty realism of Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit to Brooklyn." (Selby, indeed, reviewed "The Wanderers" for the New York Times Book Review.)
Price, however, was looking to do something different, to break out, to write a novel on a grand scale. The result was "Clockers," a 600-plus-page epic about a crack dealer and a homicide cop, set in the projects of a city closely resembling Newark, N.J. Sprawling, kaleidoscopic, marked by an intuitive understanding of the city as an elaborately constructed landscape, "Clockers" pushed the parameters of Price's fiction, expanding on the vision of his earlier books in favor of something not unlike the social novel of the 18th and 19th centuries. In that sense, although his material was utterly contemporary, the dynamic of Price's narrative -- its sense of milieu, of scope, of what it means to live at a particular moment -- made for an odd sort of throwback: "Crime and Punishment" meets "Vanity Fair."
Price, of course, was not the only writer to look ahead by looking backward, to rethink the idea of the social novel in a culture that seemed to have passed it by. In 1989, Tom Wolfe published a manifesto in Harper's agitating for a more expansive approach to fiction; his own first novel, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (the title a nod to "Vanity Fair"), was an illustration of these principles -- or so he implied. Seven years later, Jonathan Franzen made a related argument in another Harper's essay, writing, "I mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of suburbs: I like maximum diversity and contrast packed into a single exciting experience."
