Lush Life ~ Richard Price

I’ll live a lush life in some small dive…
And there I’ll be, while I rot
With the rest of those whose lives are lonely, too..

Lush Life is one of the really beautiful standard jazz tunes written by Billy Strayhorn. And, of course, the title of the newest novel by Richard Price. This is not my usual reading genre, but being a huge fan of HBO’s The Wire, for whom Price did some writing, and with the closing up shop of this particular HBO franchise, I thought I’d give this one a …listen. I say listen, because when I went to put it on my hold list at the library, I was way, way down there. Oddly enough though, I logged in a #1 for the unabridged cd copy. The reader was Bobby Cannavale who did a great job.

Pegged as a police procedural, which always sounds like it could be an acquired taste, Price’s tale is riveting, Between some great characters and the detailed look at Manhattan’s Lower East Side, this is a novel that is one of those that’s hard to put down – or in this case, hard to stop feeding the cd’s into the player (just one more, just one more…)

Price gives us one of the great cop teams of Matty Clark and Yolando Bello, and throws the brass in their path in all their pathetic glory. Watching these two work is just a fascinating study. And to watch them work in the gentrified hodge-podge that is the Lower East Side is icing on the cake. You just will not find a better mix of character and place than Price gives the reader here.

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