Richard Price's Lush Life
From time to time, we’ll discuss works of art, literature, music, etc. that depict or embody New York in a fundamental way. First up, Lush Life . . .
Late at night, early in our young century, two kids from the Lower East Side projects run into three of the more recent immigrants to the neighborhood, and something goes horribly awry. This event sets in motion Richard Price’s tremendously entertaining and important new novel, Lush Life, published earlier this year. The book is unmistakably New York: the rapid-fire, dexterous dialogue; the tensions brought about by constant change; the up-all-night life; the characters so diverse that even the cop serving as a Chinese interpreter cannot understand the dialects spoken by some of the residents of Chinatown. Lush Life is a niftily off-kilter version of the police procedural that challenges genre expectations in provocative ways, but its greatest accomplishment is to nail down a moment—a moment just passed—in the life of New York.
Even more than Times Square, the Lower East Side is emblematic of the “new” New York, the city of perpetually declining crime rates and perpetually soaring rents, of trendy restaurants opening so quickly that they’re over before you’ve even heard of them, of entire generations being slowly forced out as others with more money force their way in. Price represents the goods and bads of this process by spreading his attention across characters from all walks of life: kids from the projects, cops on the beat, young up-and-comers, washed-out former up-and-comers, the obscenely wealthy, and those just getting by.
Price is too smart to simply condemn the new New York, as many people seem eager to these days; rather, its upsides are apparent from the first page, which shows cops with so little crime to pursue that they search in vain for something interesting to do. But the problems are there, too, with project kids living a shadow existence just around the corner from the packed restaurants and self-aggrandizing hipsters turning a white guy’s death into an occasion for creative spectacle. While the readers of Price’s book might be quick to lament the changing character (or loss of character) of the Lower East Side, the kind of people who would pick up a book like this are the beneficiaries of that changing character, and Price is keen to simply show and tell, not praise and blame. To be in New York now is to be both proud and worried, and more than any other novel in the past several years, Lush Life captures that dynamic.
