Title: Lush Life
Rating: 4 Stars
Three men are walking down a street in New York City. One man is so drunk that he has to be held up by the other two. Two young men walk up to them, pull out a gun, and demand their money. The drunk man falls and passes out on the ground. One man, knowing the drill, grimly holds out his wallet, careful not to make eye contact with either of the criminals. The third man takes a step forward towards the two robbers and says, “Not tonight, my man”. Panicked at this unusual behavior, the robber with the gun fires, mortally wounding the man that stepped forward. The two robbers take off in a panic. Equally panicked, the man who turned over his wallet runs into a building to escape.
The homicide detective assigned to the case must now make sense out of everything that happened, find the perpetrators, and try to mete out some form of rough justice to the survivors as well as to the victim’s family.
So far, this sounds like the beginning of any episode of Law & Order. As I was reading, I was waiting for those opening tones.
This is not Law & Order. It is, however, indeed a police procedural (the DA’s do make appearances, but play a small part).
What makes it different are the characters. Price shows us all of their disordered and chaotic lives. In his novel you see the victims, the criminals, the police, and all that know and love them.
Let’s start with the lead detective, Matty Clark. Between his moonlighting job of protecting a hipster bar and this case, I don’t see when he ever sleeps. By the novel’s end, he seems to be nodding off at any moment. Not only is he divorced and estranged from his children, he barely even knows their names (in his mind, he calls his two sons The Big One and the Other One). It’s not as if he’s some brilliant detective. He just plugs along. It doesn’t help that, at nearly every turn, he’s thwarted by his superiors as they adjust department priorities based upon their personal whim or by higher profile cases.
Eric Cash is the surviving victim that handed over his wallet. Thanks to a dubious pair of witnesses, he starts off as the murder suspect. The police interrogates him so extensively that he has a psychic breakdown. Even after he’s cleared, he refuses to cooperate with the police as the case gets increasingly colder. Meanwhile his mental downward spiral continues.
The murder victim’s father, Billy Marcus, is in a different kind of spiral of grief, denial, and guilt. He’s acting wildly, avoiding his grieving wife and stepdaughter while desperately trying, if ineffectually, to solve the case. He only accomplishes annoying Clark and impeding the investigation.
The shooter is Tristan. He didn’t even want to carry the gun. Being new to mugging, he didn’t know how to react when his potential victim challenged him. Having always been the low man on the totem pole, knowing that he’s shot someone has given him a boost of confidence. He stands up to his step-father. He refuses to be disrespected by his previously disdainful comrade in crime.
In the background, almost like a Greek Chorus, is the Quality of Life patrol. Driving around in an undercover taxi cab, they accost seemingly random people looking for any pretext to threaten them with arrest. The only way that their targets can escape their clutches is by informing on someone that they think is carrying an illegal gun. Finding illegal guns seems to be about the only purpose of the Quality of Life patrol.
If you can’t tell from what I’ve written, there’s a mosaic of stories all threading their way throughout this work. There’s many other characters fleshed out beyond what I’ve just described. Nearly all characters are flawed and troubled. Characters make decisions that they regret. They make mistakes difficult to recover from. These seem to be real people just trying to survive the day so that they can wake up and struggle again the next one.
Another interesting thing is that, for a police procedural, it describes procedures don’t work all that well. The detectives almost destroy a man trying to coerce him into confessing to a crime that he didn’t commit. Under pressure from their superiors or the DA office, they rush to judgment even though their guts tell them otherwise. Detectives have to violate procedures and cut corners just to keep the case creeping along its path to seeming irrelevance. All of their investigations and all of their long hours of work lead to nothing. When the crime does get solved, it’s due to completely unrelated police activity.
I enjoyed reading it. It’s a novel full of anti-heroes that are, by and large, kind of failing at their lives. I’ve read several Richard Price novels (including The Whites, written under the pseudonym Harry Brandt). They all seem to have this same somewhat bleak landscape. In some ways, I wish that he had an editor that could tighten the story a bit, but now that I’ve read more of his work, I think that I’m beginning to understand that the narrative mess that he writes is actually part of his art. The world in which he writes is messy, so it probably makes sense that his narrative style seems messy as well.
dorkenstein 