Product Description

'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".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3559 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR 'LUSH LIFE' 'This is it, folks. The novel about gentrified New York, circa right now, that we've been waiting for. Richard Price understands what's happened to our beloved city, he writes dialogue like a genius, and he absolutely, genuinely cares. Unforgettable.' Gary Shteyngart 'With 'Lush Life' Richard Price has become our post-modern American Balzac. Except that he's a whole lot funnier than Balzac and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around, living or dead, American or French. He's a writer I hope my great-grandchildren will read, so they'll know what it was like to be truly alive in the early 21st century.' Russell Banks

Sunday Telegraph
`With an ear for the street like no other writer, Price writes dialogue that's pacy, authentic and funny ... Lush Life is a great read - entertaining, textured, animated and often deeply true'

Daily Telegraph
`master chronicler of gritty urban street life ... Dickensian ... the book's main character - richly drawn, full or ironies and haunted by the past - is the Lower East Side'

Customer Reviews

Could try harder...
I tend to agree with the previous reviewer, although I did finish the book. This is definitely a case of style over substance. Lush Life is well written, and I am sure is an insightful look at the workings of NYPD. However, the novel really meanders along rather aimlessly, there is not much going on in the way of plot, and the denouement is rather unconvincing.

The same thing is true about the main characters. Although the main protagonist, Eric Cash, is well depicted, it is difficult to really get into any of the other characters, and much of the success of a book like this depends on the reader's ability to sympathise with the characters.

Having just read Right As Rain, I also have to agree that Pelecanos seems on the strength of this a much more engaging author.

Marvellous
A great book: Superb dialogue,riveting plot,well drawn characters and all within a run-down area of New York. The description of the contrast between the poor residents and the increasing number of white wannabes is particularly effective
The main characters,Matty Wright and Yolanda Bello, can join the pantheon of great detectives with John Rebus and Steve Carella.
This the first book by Richard Price which I have read and my enjoyment was not impaired by seeing "The Wire". I look forward to reading more.

An annoying book
The author tries too hard. Possibly living of the kudos garnered from the Wire, Richard Price tries ever so hard to capture the hip talk so characteristic of the TV programme. However he has forgotten to weave in a plot here and don't you find it annoying that writers such as Ian Rankin have to "sanitise" their books for the American market while we are all meant to wade through the gobbledegook as if we speak the lingo.
And it also annoys me that British critics have been falling over themselves to praise this book to no doubt show off their "hipster" credentials, while Price's fellow Wire writer George Pelecanos is the real talent and manages to write novels that can be enjoyed on both sides of the Atlantic

And no I didn't finish it - sorry if that loses me credibility.