I’ll live a lush life in some small dive
Nowadays, American TV isn’t as bad as yesterday’s dad-rockers used to think. Back in 1979 Pink Floyd sang of the irritations of ‘13 channels of sh*t on the T.V. to choose from’, by ‘92 the number of channels had risen to 57, but there was still ‘nothin’ on’ according to the weighty authority of Bruce Springsteen. It’s no surprise that Bruce’s song was written in the early Nineties – in 1997 HBO launched Oz, their first quality drama series.
Since then, programmes like 6 Feet Under, The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire have made songs that whine about bad telly slightly redundant. And you can’t really rock out about ’staying in to catch a really good drama show’.
Of these decent programmes, The Wire is often reckoned to the most brilliant. I’ve only managed to see the first series so far, but it does seem to be a beacon of carefully sculpted characters, microscopically-detailed research and plotting of Byzantine complexity. The writing team of the fifth and final series included the author of gritty urban crime novels and screenplays, Richard Price.
Lush Life, Price’s eighth novel is set in the Lower East Side of New York. It’s not the harsh drug-scarred landscape of the Baltimore projects, but life for characters that inhabit this novel is also no walk in (Central) Park. The neighborhood has long been the first port of call for poor immigrants into America, but now there is a new kind of influx: arty, middle-class youngsters.
Gentrification can create resentments in the original population, but for Price, the various ethnicities and classes who live in the area rarely seem to make contact. Until, that is, events seek to puncture the membrane that separates them.
Like in The Wire, Lush Life uses some of the stock characters of the detective genre – there’s even a hard-bitten, Irish-American cop with family problems as a central protagonist – but Price avoids creating cardboard cut outs. The novel zooms in to show us the perspective of each of these central characters, who are never less than believable and sympathetic. His myriad voices are alive with the roar of the city.
One of the most intriguing characters is Eric Cash, a 35 year old bar/restaurant manager who first came to the city in his early twenties hoping to become a writer. After initially working in catering to support his writing, Eric’s dreams are disappointments and his job a dead end. He’s now adrift – bitter and frustrated.
Early one morning Eric and two new acquaintances get mugged as they walk home from a night on the lash. Eric, knowing the procedure, looks down and hands over his wallet. One of the others, Ike, still green (young, dumb and full of ambitions for artistic success), plays it cool with a “Not tonight, my man”, which gets him shot.
Solving the crime doesn’t reveal conspiratorial links to organized crime, big business and bent politicians. Instead the murder is absurd. As one character puts it, “It was like nothing. It was like God snapped his fingers.” It’s also a wonder that anyone gets caught. The investigation gives us a glimpse into a society composed of East Asian men who hire a shelf to sleep on by the hour, teenagers orphaned by drugs living with distant relatives and upstate cops driving round town while stoned out of their brains.
If the characters in Lush Life who currently inhabit the Lower East Side are vivid, their predecessors are never far behind. The synagogue roof may have collapsed, but the pages of a battered scripture littering the building’s shell are still valued by a passing rabbi.
Eric Cash, Price’s doppelganger, takes to sheltering in his restaurant basement. Eric’s ancestors had also lived in the area. Underground, with the weight of the Victorian tenement above him, a piece of Yiddish graffiti proclaims ‘Gedenken mir’ – remember me.
Tags: Lush Life Richard Price The Wire Dad Rock HBO