Lush Life

by Richard Price, Bloomsbury, 464pp, £12.99. "It's pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you're in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive," said Sam Leith in The Spectator.

"Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and without a false note or moment of drag." On the face of it, it's a "standard police procedural". Eric Cash, an aspiring writer in his mid-thirties managing a hip New York bar, goes drinking with a bartender and another man. In the early morning they are mugged by two black boys, one holding a gun. Eric hands over his wallet; the bartender says: "Not tonight, my man," and is shot dead ("suicide by mouth", one cop calls it).

Richard Price, "a writer of quite extraordinary gifts", uses the story of the investigation to paint a panoramic picture of the city, full of "extravagant details" and "almost Dickensian cameos". Price is best known for Clockers, said Reggie Nadelson in The Times - his novel about cocaine dealers on a New Jersey housing project - as well as for his contributions to the hit TV series The Wire.

His new book is "a spectacularly good read, a trip through Manhattan's Lower East Side" - a place where, in 2003, when the story is set, real-estate developers and well-off young bohemians were driving out the immigrants and the poor.

"No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price," said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. "He's as adept as Tom Wolfe at using his journalistic eye for social detail but he does so without turning his characters, as Wolfe so often does, into caricatures or cartoons." Lush Life is well-plotted and "crammed with memorable scenes, dialogue, images", said Toby Litt in The Guardian. But it is marred by smugness. It's often hard to avoid the sense that "the writing is very pleased with itself indeed".

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 11, 2008