Be prepared to hit the pavement of Manhattan's Lower East Side at full stride in Lush Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Richard Price's crackling new novel. As in his previous work (including the 1992 thriller Clockers and the HBO narcotics drama The Wire), Price shows off his skill at capturing the unfiltered sounds of the urban landscape, dropping you cold into the jargon-rich terrain of the Eighth Precinct's police station, housing projects, and trendy restaurants, often without the aid of an omniscient interpreter: "The deal was this: opposite sides of the street; if they saw a likely bunch of heads, the one across the street from them goes up a block, then crosses over, then comes back down so they got them in a pincers."
The book follows the ups and downs of an investigation into the murder of Ike Marcus, a 20-something bartender and aspiring actor. After a night of excessive drinking, Ike has an unlucky encounter with a pair of aspiring thieves. A .22-caliber "whistle" is pulled. Ike steps up and delivers a hero line: "Not tonight, my man." His performance earns him a bullet to the chest.
Shortly thereafter, veteran police detective Matty Clark arrives at the scene. Like all of Price's protagonists, Matty comes fully loaded with psychological baggage, and his devotion to detective work — the sorting out of problems not his own — verges on addiction. He and his interrogation partner, a voluptuous Puerto Rican named Yolanda, finger Eric Cash — Ike's boss at a local restaurant and once an aspiring writer and actor — as the killer. But is Eric really guilty? What follows is an illuminating peek inside the department's ego-infested hierarchy.
An Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (for The Color of Money) who grew up in the Bronx, Price has a knack for hearing the way people actually speak, and he has the cadence and crescendo of the interrogation room down to a science. Every pause, sidelong glance, and let's-go-through-it-one-more-time sigh rings jarringly true as Matty and Yolanda do a number on Eric's fragile psyche, indicting him not so much for murder as for being a washout: "'You're a terrible actor, you know that?' Matty yanked at his tie. 'No wonder you wound up working in a restaurant.'"
But cops-and-robbers is just the convention through which Price explores larger issues. At its core, Lush Life chronicles the flip side to the American dream of upward mobility: the realization that the city's promise of limitless possibility may have already expired. It's a dark post-9/11 portrait of New York, in which the concept of altruism — not to mention judicious police work — seems virtually nonexistent.
