Anatomy of a Murder’s Aftermath: Lush Life by Richard Price

By Breanne Boland April 17, 2008 Issue

Lush Life unfolds in a dense few blocks of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where history, class, and race overlap in a way that keeps neighbors strangers and that makes for unavoidably adversarial relationships.

The murder of Ike Marcus one drunken night catches public attention in a few ways - the victim was white, the murder took place in a fairly gentrified neighborhood, and the victim’s coworker and fellow barhopper is initially fingered for the crime. After the murder, we move from the inner workings of the NYPD with Detective Matty Clark; to the self-destructive downward spiral of Eric Cash, the wrongfully accused coworker; to the fidgeting reactions of the actual murderer, Tristan, a kid from the nearby projects.

The opening crime is more catalyst than plot. The book’s 455 pages are concerned more with character than anything else, and the story is richer for it. Rather than distantly watching the unfolding developments of the police department and those they pursue, we drift from place to place, which keeps things interesting while developing the occasional marvelous sense of foreboding.

Detective Clark works with a deceptively empathetic officer named Yolanda, who can position herself as an ally to a suspect, talking in honeyed tones while soundlessly peeling away their lies and alibis. Between investigations, Clark finds himself saddled with the disintegration of the victim’s father, who clings to the officer, trying to be helpful despite being totally, completely out of his element. Even when he’s home, he can’t escape the drama - his two estranged meathead sons are dabbling in drug dealing. Soon, even his own department won’t help him with the Marcus crime - after the embarrassment of dragging their most important witness across the coals, they’d rather just let the case go cold.

Across the tracks, newly minted murderer Tristan deals with the ironic problem of not being able to claim the street cred of being one of the few real, hard criminals in his projects, still the social pariah he always was. The other families around him, his own and those of the kids he tries vainly to befriend, are a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances. With this malleable, every-man-for-himself world, a simple traffic stop creates a thread for the police to follow, a charge to use as leverage to find the big fish behind the minnows they usually work with.

The dialogue is brilliantly written. Price has a deft way with tools as simple as punctuation; without drawing you out of what the character is saying, his subtle use of periods and commas lifts the characters’ cadence and tone right off the page. Likewise, he takes his ordinary characters, many of who aren’t close to each other and are acquainted only through circumstances of work or fate, and brings them fully alive and into the mundane realities of everyday life.

Price’s work is one of tone and texture rather than breakneck action. A CSI-style mystery thriller this is not; while there is police work and hard-edged interrogations, the real progress is made by simple intuition and the natural movement of fate. These advances are interspersed with the dysfunctional workings of a chic New York restaurant, interdepartmental politics at the police department, and the unfolding of a well-meant but gauche funeral.

We see it all from the beginning; our job is simply to wait for all the characters to catch up with each other and finally cross paths. Fortunately, Price’s portrait of a slice of a neighborhood that’s just part of an enormous city is vivid enough that doing so is absorbing.

Lush Life, 455 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Available at bookstores, libraries, and online booksellers.

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