In Priceland | The New York Review of Books

Lush Life
by Richard Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,455 pp., $26.00

1.

The protagonists of Richard Price’s first four novels suffer from the fatal weakness of character known to moralists, comedians, writers of tragedy, and bullshit artists as New York City. Brash and withdrawn; hangdog and prone to delusions of grandeur; cynical and compassionate; fixated on the quick score, the next hit; lousy with moments of grace and of violence; ineffectual yet capable of anything; hilarious and sad; speaking a rapid-fire Yiddish-Italian-black creole of poetry, bullshit, and monte-shark patter, New York City defines the Price hero. It gives him shape, explains him, demarcates the upper limit of what he can imagine and the depth to which he can sink. New York is an ideal he can fail to live up to, a con game, a baggie filled with baby laxative, a set of bad habits, the collective bonehead MO of eight million repeat offenders.

As a hungry young hopeful, raised in the Parkside Houses and Co-op City, Price got off to an admirable start with

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Paul Volcker, chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, at a meeting with President Obama at the White House, March 13, 2009

The Wanderers (1974), a loose-knit Bronx myth cycle, set in the early Sixties, that reads like a bunch of twice-told tales honed and crafted to wow upstaters, hillbillies, Californians, and other rubes, about life in the bad old Bronx. Some of the book’s sections are tinged with Ashcan Guignol worthy of EC Comics and others (including the unforgettable gang fight with a bunch of psychotic midgets called the Ducky Boys) approach magic realism in their blend of the preposterous with deadeye detail.

But like one of his own early protagonists, in the three novels that followed—Bloodbrothers (1976),

Ladies’ Man

The Breaks

The Wanderers

Bloodbrothers

The intermittently brilliant, sometimes stolidly written novels that followed The Wanderers all chart the progress, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they advance the stasis, of an interchangeable series of cocky, sympathetic, fucked-up, motor-mouthed Bronx boys who contend with forces of character and fate recognizable both from classical tragedy and from the post-Odets New York noir that reimagined it. His heroes’ strength is their weakness: wanting, passionately wanting more; and their weakness—they talk too much—is their strength. People are always telling Price’s heroes, in these early novels, that they ought to do stand-up (never that they ought to be novelists). The hair-trigger, foulmouthed riff pioneered by Lenny Bruce and perfected by Richard Pryor, making gold from the straw of indignity and humiliation (of other people and, most amusingly, of oneself): this is a Price hero’s only weapon.

In Priceland | The New York Review of Books