empezo con mucha intensidad y movimiento pero de repente la trama se detuvo. resulto ser una de estas novelas donde la trama es secundaria. esta mas bien interesada en desarrollar personajes y su medioambiente. hay algunas cosas interesantes. a mi esa zona de lower manhattan me intriga por la importancia que tuvo para la migracion puertorriqueña y para los artistas y musicos. los personajes sin embargo no me parecen creibles. ni el bartender ni el policia. muchas situaciones tampoco me sonaron creibles. la relacion con el padre. el velorio me parecio de frat kids no de artistas. lo mejor de la novela? me divirtio llegar a la apertura de una exhibicion de arte oyendo la version en audiobook. ( )

mystery

A mugging on the perilous streets of New York City goes bad and the subsequent murder investigation goes even worse. This type of crime novel is usually pretty routine, but instead of the usual book-em-and-cook-em drill, I found myself reading about cops who care -- who even cry at funerals. The language of the streets was wonderfully crisp and blunt (I became immune to the F-bombs after awhile). I enjoyed the contradiction of the grittiness of the plot and characters being written about in Price's literary style. It kept me reading about the dogged determination of partners Matty and Yolanda who persist in solving this agonizing case despite getting sucked into a downward spiral of mistakes and bad luck. ( )

I thought this had just about the snappiest, funniest start to a novel imaginable, every bit as 'real' in its use of dialogue as The Wire, for which Price has written on several occasions. The rest of the novel doesn't quite live up to that moment (though there are other hilarious set-pieces, most notably the funeral orations for Ike Marcus, whose murder lies at the centre of the book). I think this is because Price is writing within the crime genre but with a focus much more on character and social comment than on plot. This is admirable, and certainly allows for some effective satire aimed at Manhattan's young, artistic community, but if you are going to invest time in a lengthy genre novel then you expect plot to lie at its heart. There are no twists in this novel, just the slow, unremarkable unfolding of a murder investigation. ( )

A 4MA discussion book. The minute I picked it up, I thought 'ahhhh.....' The dialogue feels so real to me, and I love the way Price writes. The initial pages spent with the absurd Quality of Life Task Force (four plain clothes cops, who in their thirties are the 'oldest white men on the Lower East Side,' whose job it is to harass people who might be doing something illegal) just took me right into it. Like Lawrence Block there's a nice sense of the variety of humanity you meet in some neighborhoods of the city, and some of his affection for the city. Like Jim Fusilli, there's a lot of detail that gives people a real sense of the place and arouses lots of nostalgia for those who know those blocks of the city. But Richard Price is more involved in the different characters' perspectives than either Block or Fusilli is. The Scudder and Terry Orr books are first person, and that person's journey is very much where the center of gravity is. In LUSH LIFE the point of view shifts quite a bit, so we see that section of the lower east side from the POV of a kid who lives in the projects, a failed restaurateur/bartender, and cops. It's much more psychological than Block, much more sociological than Fusilli. All in all, a less feverishly realized novel than FREEDOMLAND which remains my favorite of Price's books but it's still as real and as in-depth as it gets.