Picked this up at a used book store after hearing a couple interviews with Price on Fresh Air, once for his work on The Wire, once about his new book that is out (Fresh City? Free World? something like that). The story of Strike, a young drug dealer in the projects somewhere in New Jersey. We never really get Strike's full story, how he came to hold that "job," but I suppose the business is insidious like that. It took me a long time to get into the story. As I analyze it now, I cannot decide whether I liked it. I guess I'd say that the author was true in sticking to the points of view of the two main characters, dealer Strike and cop Rocco, showing their confusion in trying to sort out exactly where they stand with other players at any given time. "There's a little good in the worst of us, and a little bad in the best of us" also comes through during the course of the narrative, but mostly "there's a little stupid in all of us" was the biggest impression I was left with.

Richard Price's epic (over 600 pages in the mass market paperback edition) novel Clockers sinks the reader deeply -- perhaps far more deeply than he thought he wanted to be -- into the daily life of a street-level drug dealer (or "clocker," in Price's street argot) and a homicide detective with a perhaps too young wife and a severe case of mid-life crisis. Essentially a slice-of-life covering just two weeks, Clockers is less a crime novel or mystery than it is a naturalistic (think Theodore Dreiser) look at a segment of the American underclass in a declining, fictional, mid-sized New Jersey city.

Strike is a 19-year-old clocker, ulcer-sufferer (he constantly chugs vanilla Yoo-Hoo) and protege of his dealer / convenience store-owner boss, the Jheri curled O.G. Rodney, who is charged with executing a wayward employee of Rodney's; Rocco is a forty-three year-old homicide detective longing to retire or change careers who finally gets recharged by his investigation of the above-mentioned murder. What follows is both more and less than what one might expect after a lifetime of TV cop (and, latterly, forensics) shows, Hollywood movies, crime novels, police procedurals and pulp thrillers, and this is both Clockers' glory and, ultimately, downfall: while the dialogue scans as utterly believable (if a little more profanely literate and witty than most of us could manage over the course of a normal day) and the events unfold with a homely realism, the anti-climactic conclusion may well leave some readers with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Price's real genius here may well be in demonstrating just how much the reader has been programmed by pop cultural treatments of this type of subject matter to want a definite conclusion to their cops-n'-criminals stories, whether good or bad.

The term "clockers" is ingenious, as every single one of the characters -- and, ultimately, the reader -- is "nailed to the face of time" (p. 582 of the mass market pb; Chapter 33) by circumstances over which they have laughably little control.

And yes, at least one sequence from Clockers was used in the HBO TV series The Wire: the "Goodnight, werewolves" bit at the end of Chapter 2. ( )

Sad that The Wire is over? Read this book. ( )

Strike is a black teeneager in Dempsey, New Jersey, a “crew chief” for a major drug distributor. He runs a group of “clockers”, young teenagers who sell bottles of cocaine, although he himself doesn’t touch the stuff--he has enough trouble with his ulcer.

Rocco is a Dempsey Homicide detective, who is a borderline alcoholic. He becomes obsessed with Strike when Strike’s brother Victor turns himself in for killing another drug dealer; Rocco is convinced that Victor is lying to cover for his brother.

These are the two main protagonists, and for 593 pages, we read of life on the streets for both drug dealers and users, of “dirty” cops, of drug raids and everyday harassment, of racial profiling, of lines of cars filled mostly with whites picking up their bottles from the clockers on the streets.

This is neither an edifying nor particularly uplifting story, although there is a surprise ending. It’s mostly a matter-of-fact, very well written detailed account of life on the streets and of too many cops who bend or break the rules in their efforts to deal with the impossible problem of drugs. The characters are not particularly likable; it’s hard to feel any empathy for any of them, even Victor. Strike and his boss Rodney are the most believable, the best drawn, but Rodney is scum, no matter how he pictures himself as a businessman who tries to teach his young charges a better way of living through drug dealing.

The story line is really a documentary--a well-written and well-produced documentary, but having the emotional distance and impersonality of a documentary. I have no doubt of the reality of Price’s scene, but it did not move me. In particular, I am pretty sick of boozy, well-meaning quasi-dirty cops in literature, and Rocco is a totally unsympathetic character as far as I’m concerned.

Well written, well told, but somehow lacking in any kind of passion--it just simply failed to engage me. ( )

Vanilla Yahoo! crack dealers in NY, life in the projects; another extremely important 'empathy' book