You don’t need me to tell you that Richard Price’s Lush Life is a great novel; Michael Chabon tells you all about it here. But it’s maybe worth further mentioning the way Price steeps his novel in the history of the Lower East Side. It echoes with names significant to a historian of the early 1900s: Riis, Cahan, Lemlich. They’re the names of people who tried to help the working people and immigrants of New York City: Riis who Theodore Roosevelt claimed inspired him to progressivism, Cahan who tried to invent an American Jewish socialism, Lemlich who organized the shirtwaist workers (except, notably, at Triangle).
Their New York has become the ruined foundation to Price’s punningly titled novelistic landscape of collapsed and desanctified synagogues, of basement hearths once home to aspiring immigrants, now witness to drug deals and thefts and the moral collapse of protagonist Eric Cash.
Also, if you like the major theme of The Wire—what corrupt institutions do to the individuals asked to persevere within them—then this is a good book for you. Go, read.
23 comments
July 25, 2008 at 10:47 am
Vance Maverick
punningly titled
More punningly than the Billy Strayhorn song? (Maybe I’ll have to read it to find out.)
July 25, 2008 at 10:54 am
washerdreyer
Cash’s morals get worse in the course of the novel? How? Because he’s taking a larger cut off the tips? Because he tries to deal coke again?
July 25, 2008 at 10:55 am
ben wolfson
That’s sort of the theme of Croupier, sort of.
July 25, 2008 at 10:56 am
rja
is one of the best movies ever.
July 25, 2008 at 11:00 am
eric
Did you finish the whole thing, w/d?
July 25, 2008 at 11:10 am
washerdreyer
Yeah, a month or so ago, and maybe I’m forgetting a key detail or didn’t fully understand part of the novel while I was reading it, butI don’t see how *Spoilers*
moving to Atlantic City to participate in a artifical recreation of the LES (the end of Cash’s arc, and sure an interesting comment on the superficial aesthetic of the real LES) has him any more morally collapsed than he is for most of the novel when he’s refusing to help the police out of (merited) spite. The reader finds out more about Cash’s morals, I stand by my comment that they don’t change much.
July 25, 2008 at 11:12 am
SomeCallMeTim
Did you like “Fatherland,” Eric? (I’m looking for some key to see if your fiction taste matches mine.)
July 25, 2008 at 11:13 am
ben wolfson
Is it a pun, or just, you know, a lucus a non lucendo type situation?
July 25, 2008 at 11:20 am
eric
I stand by my comment that they don’t change much.
OK. I think he thinks he underwent a moral collapse—hence the comment about being turned into a bug.
July 25, 2008 at 11:21 am
eric
Did you like “Fatherland,” Eric?
Don’t think I’ve ever read it, sorry, Tim.
July 25, 2008 at 11:21 am
eric
Is it a pun, or just, you know, a lucus a non lucendo type situation?
Why don’t you read the book and tell me, ben?
July 25, 2008 at 11:22 am
Vance Maverick
Some speculate that Strayhorn’s pun is, as it were, built in. It’s not a ridiculous stretch — associated through luxury, overindulgence.
July 25, 2008 at 12:01 pm
washerdreyer
His sense of self is destroyed via trauma and interrogation, I took moral collapse to mean that his morals get worse in the course of the novel. But the two worst things he does are not assisting the police (which he eventually repents of) and getting a guy drunk and then beating him pretty badly (which he seems to always think was a good idea) and they happen early on.
July 25, 2008 at 12:34 pm
urbino
Whatever the case may be with Eric Cash’s morals, Lush Life is a fine read. I second eric’s recommendation.
July 25, 2008 at 12:50 pm
eric
There you go, Tim: we know urbino and I have divergent literary tastes, yet both of us liked Lush Life.
July 25, 2008 at 1:03 pm
matt w
I hereby record that I understand and approve of the allusion in the post title.
July 25, 2008 at 1:11 pm
urbino
we know urbino and I have divergent literary tastes
Actually, we’ve agreed on 2 out of 3.
July 25, 2008 at 1:39 pm
neocynic
Actually, we’ve agreed on 2 out of 3.
Look at that. eric’s flip-flopping. Typical liberal. We can’t tell what his position is re: urbino’s literary tastes, because he says one thing and does another.
Probably likes to lose wars, too.
July 25, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Lushes « Sifu Tweety’s Crap Stove
[...] Eric says he doesn’t need to tell me that Lush Life is a great book, but that’s a lie. I [...]
July 25, 2008 at 3:10 pm
SomeCallMeTim
There you go, Tim: we know urbino and I have divergent literary tastes, yet both of us liked Lush Life.
But is it better than Nixonland?
July 25, 2008 at 3:11 pm
urbino
A good question.
July 29, 2008 at 9:10 am
Vance Maverick
I’ve read this now, and I enjoyed it (stayed up late!), but I think “great” is overselling it. It’s a pretty good crime novel.
I’m in no position, of course, to judge the authenticity of the speech. (Has “copacetic” really made a comeback? In the projects?) There are some effectively structured dialogues. But the narrative prose is workmanlike at best, and sometimes careless. Early on I noticed that two different characters “palmed” their hearts. By the end of the book, something had been palmed in this sense three more times.
The plot works well, but I was annoyed by a bit of misdirection in the whodunit. (A spoiler, I suppose:) We the readers are given two suspects, call them A and B. The actual crime is not narrated directly, so we can’t be sure which, if any, did it. The police at first suspect A, then release him. Now, for the bulk of the book, we think the culprit is probably B, but we’re not sure, and the police don’t know who B is. In the last pages, they catch up with B, and that’s that. No sense of a mystery being resolved — perhaps there wasn’t intended to be one.
Finally, there’s a certain amount of quiet misogyny. Some takes the form that our friends on the distaff blogs call “slut-shaming” — female characters appear, display some sexuality, suffer, and vanish. Some, I think, appears in the treatment of the female detective. She has a quick rapport with others, which is fine, but is presented first as a cynical tactic (for interrogation), and later as a weakness (she misreads the culprit). In this, of course, Price is certainly the heir of the garden-variety crime novel.
No regrets — I enjoyed it — but I won’t be returning to Price any sooner than to, say, Pelecanos.
July 29, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Lush Life « Grimpen
[...] July 29, 2008 Over on Edge of the American West, Eric Rauchway posted a review of Richard Price’s Lush Life. This spurred me to read the book myself (it’s been [...]