'So, what do you do?' Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter ...But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places - until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At ...
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'So, what do you do?' Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter ...But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places - until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version. In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the 'new' New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an X-ray of the street in the age of no broken windows and 'quality of life' squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism ...reads like a movie in prose' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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The book is in great shape and well worth the money but it reads like a movie script rather than a book, if that makes any sense. A bit disappointing, hard to get with the characters.
I will wait for the movie.
riverrun
Oct 3, 2009
An Unerring Ear
In Lush Life, Richard Price uses the police procedural to describe the clash between the old and the new Lower East Side, the immigrant communities and the gentrification of those same communities into restaurants, bars, boutiques and prime real estate, between the projects and the strivers, between the collapsed synagogues and the new highrises.
What's most brilliant and unerring about Price's novel is his ear for dialogue. This is a book, as Eudora Welty has said, that is "written by ear." He captures the voices of the young urban professionals, the police on the Quality of Life Task Force, the African American and Latino youth of the housing projects. In addition, he discloses the simmering race and class tensions beneath the surface of the "new" New York City.
Ceinwein
Jul 10, 2008
Glimpse into another world
The street slang used in the early pages of this book was almost enough to make me put the book down. I did not understand it and I didn?t want to start a book focused on crime and violence. Fortunately, I stuck with it. The story is raw and edgy, just as you might imagine daily life in New York City?s lower east side. The book is long but you enjoy the time spent getting to know each character intimately. The author does an excellent job of expressing the hopelessness and hopefulness of life in this changing urban setting. It?s a glimpse into another world - one best viewed through the eyes of the author, Richard Price.
