Alaska Employment Law

Richard Price is renowned for novels marked by detailed, evocative dialog, most often street slang in places like New York City or northern New Jersey. His first novel was The Wanderers, which was made into a controversial film in the late 70s, though the controversy (as I recall it, excessive reality likely to foment riot) seems a little quaint now. Not surprisingly, Price is also a very successful writer of screenplays.

Price’s latest is Lush Life (2008), a story about a city killing – the victim is a young bohemian named Ike, whose last words make the newspapers – and the efforts of two cops, Matty Clark and Yolanda Bello, to solve it. Ike’s friend Eric, himself a bit of human wreckage, was at the scene. Because there are a pair of eyewitnesses (lovers in the middle of an argument) who believe they saw him commit the crime, and because his own story has its problems, Eric is charged with the murder. The many pages of Lush Life devoted to how the police obtain (one would almost say, seduce) Eric’s confession help us to understand why false confessions are given. In any case, Officer Clark is not entirely persuaded. I liked this book for its gutty street realism, but I thought it lacked emotional coherence. At times it seemed like a series of brilliantly staged and lighted scenes, successively presented. On the plus side, there is a good deal of story that is enjoyably mordant. The book opens in an old car with the Quality of Life Task Force: four plain clothes cops, who in their thirties are the “oldest white men on the Lower East Side,” whose job it is to harass local citizens who might be doing something illegal. Critics generally loved this book, which made numerous “best of” lists.

I liked Lush Life enough to try Clockers (1992), which was made into a Spike Lee film that earned middling reviews in the 90s. Where Lush Life is slick but, to me anyway, not fully engaging (sort of like a really good episode of Law and Order, after which you just want to watch the news and call it a night), Clockers is scary, and I mean that in a good way. Clockers is 600 pages about cocaine dealing in a northern New Jersey slum known as Dempsey, a universe so narrow and paranoid that I started to feel the paranoia, and pretty keenly, too. Price gives us Rocco Klein, a detective close to retirement, and Strike (real name: Ronald Dunham), a lieutenant in the street drug trade, a kid who swills vanilla Yoo-Hoo for his undiagnosed ulcer and works for Rodney, one of the more evil figures in all of police procedural fiction precisely because the character is not overdone. Rodney wants a competitor killed, and he implies that it’s Strike’s job. But when the murder happens, it’s Strike’s straight-arrow brother, Victor, who confesses. If Eric’s confession in Lush Life is faulty, Victor’s is just about preposterous, and Klein can’t believe it. Clockers is much more successful, in my view, in integrating plot, character and that sharp-as-razors dialog (how on earth do they translate this stuff for foreign editions?) that Price loves.

I want to add a short quote from the NY Times review of the novel.

[T]he novel’s most impressive accomplishment is the sheer amount of exposition it deploys and controls without ever losing its narrative drive. To read Clockers is to become privy to truckloads of what seems to be authoritatively inside information – years of research apparently paying off. When bending over a body at a crime scene, remember to tuck in your tie. Going after a suspected murderer on a night raid?  Stick two light bulbs in a big manila envelope and jam the flat end in the back of your pants: “The last thing a cop wanted to do after plowing through an apartment door was search a bedroom by flashlight.”  Going to the probation office? Sit on the molded plastic chairs because the fabric ones “take in stink and crawling things off people’s hair and clothes.” Planning on running a cocaine crew on a street corner?  Move your stash apartment every day: “Knockos can’t go through a door without having paper, and by the time they got the paper signed by a judge, the apartment wasn’t there anymore.”  So much information is disseminated that by the end of the novel the reader feels more or less ready to investigate a homicide or start up a drug operation, or both.

As you can tell, strongly recommended!