Lush Life
by Richard Price
A drunk writer who moonlights as a bartender startles his inept and inexperienced mugger; the kid flinches, the bartender falls dead, and it’s another night in the Lower East Side. The eyewitnesses turn out to be idiots who foul everything up, the police interrogation gets the wrong guy, the brass interfere, and soon the case is hopeless. The main characters are pretty hopeless as well, as nearly everyone stews in mild self-loathing. Price writes nearly everything as an interrogation; for these characters, few of whom are likable, even internal dialog is adversarial. The conceit works well while also showing us just how much is actually happening. The book, like its gentrified tenements and its Projects, is bursting with characters who are going about their business and who just happen, for a time, to cross paths with the police. Some are going upstate, some are going to make it, some are going to hell in a bucket, and some are going to Jersey: they're all going places, and almost all of them have something going.