The Price is right
Source: Globe and Mail (Original Article)
LUSH LIFEBy Richard PriceFarrar, Straus & Giroux,464 pages, $28.50
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New York novelist and screenwriter Richard Price has always been more than one of our finest contemporary crime writers. With his novels, which include the flawless Clockers, and Freedomland, and his work for film and television, which includes the Oscar-nominated script for The Color of Money and critically lauded turns at the helm of HBO’s The Wire, the genre provides Price with a clear lens for an increasingly rare sort of social realism, a framework within which to explore gritty, street-level social and human realities.
With his new novel, Lush Life, Price focuses on Manhattan’s rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side, where customers line up for tables at Henry Steele’s tony restaurant, while others wait in the heat to see a vision of the Madonna in the glass of a convenience-store cooler, where housing projects stand next to high-priced condos and immigrant shanty apartments.
Lush Life begins with a murder. In the early morning, three men are walking drunkenly through the neighbourhood. Two of the men work together: Ike Marcus is the new bartender-cum-struggling artist at Berkmann’s, an St George Platinum Card upscale restaurant managed by Eric Cash, …continue reading