NO MATTER HOW SHINY AND safe a city gets, how high its housing prices climb, how fast its crime rates fall and how many of its corner stores are turned into boutiques, there is part of it that will always resist gentrification.
Richard Price,
rightly praised for his award-winning work on The Wire, has a perfect eye and ear for such places. He sets his eighth novel on the streets of New York's Lower East Side, which he portrays so intimately that it's as though the book had been written from its stoops and doorways.
Down on newly-hip Orchard and Eldridge Streets, among the exclusive clubs and fusion restaurants, the former urban jungle has almost themed itself out of existence, turning a lot of the police into little more than park rangers. Once in a while though, the bad guys pounce, tempted by so much slow-moving, pampered prey, sodden with money and novelty martinis.
The victim here is Eric Cash, in his own mind an emerging writer but known to the world as a restaurant manager. In his mid-30s, the descendant of Jewish ghetto-dwellers who lived and died on the same city blocks where Eric is riding out his undiscovered phase along with 20,000 other tip-dependent, would-be screenwriters, he heads out one night with two pals into the hood and suddenly finds himself in Scorsese land. A gun comes out, a brown finger on its trigger, and the next thing Eric knows he's in the ugly room recounting the mugging and murder of his friend Ike to a female officer, Yolanda, and a more traditional male and Irish fellow, Matty Clark.
Eric thinks he's a witness but really he's a suspect, and Price provides the taut, triangular dialogue, which at first sounds a bit like standard noir talk but soon grows bushier, thornier and taller in a way the screen can never quite contain.
Here's a restaurant owner, Eric's boss, griping about the hypersensitive neighbours who've been bugging him to keep the noise down or risk the cancellation of his drinks licence. "The whites. The, the 'pioneers. ... The Latinos? The Chinese? The ones been living here since the Flood? Couldn't be nicer. Happy for the jobs. The thing is, the complainers? They're the ones that started all this. We just follow them. Always have, always will. Come down here, buy some smack squat from the city, do a little fix-up, have a nice big studio, rent out the extra space, mix it up with the ethnics, feel all good and politically righteous about yourself. But those lofts now? Those buildings? Twenty-five hundred square feet, fourth floor, no elevator, Orchard and Broome. Two point four mil just last week."
It's not just the dialogue: Price has a vivid sense of place. "The Clara E. Lemlich Houses were a grubby sprawl of 50-year-old high-rises sandwiched between two centuries. To the west, the 14-story buildings were towered over by ... massive futuristic structures without any distinguishing features other than their blind climbing endlessness."
So if Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price's skull, in the enormous, cross-sensory architecture of the last three words above, one detects Saul Bellow's vision, too. Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the keystone of his novel is a box-shaped New York Police Department office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn't just present a slice of life, he piles life high and deep. Time too. The past is rendered mostly as an absence, though, as a set of caverns, a hive of catacombs. Some of his characters' ancestors are down there, but the main way we know this is through the hollowness of the new neighbourhood built over their crypts.
Should it even be called a neighbourhood now? Price asks. That's the grand question the book sets out to answer by way of a thousand other tiny questions about who did it; who saw it; why it happened; and whether – in the case of Ike's stricken, delirious father, who is the novel's master character even if he doesn't dominate its stage – its human consequences can be endured.
For quite a while the answer is "no". The Lower East Side shown here is hardly any kind of community: all kinship ties, religious, racial and familial, have long since dissolved. The delinquents from the projects, the crooks and the perps are more durably unified, one feels, than the unattached brats whom they pick off one by one as these slummers vomit cocktails into the gutters after nights out with friends they met only yesterday who moved into town only the week before.
Tentatively, however, fragile, improvised bonds begin developing like laundry lines strung between apartment windowsills. The catalyst is a miniature crisis which sees detectives align themselves with victims' families, freed suspects with the officials who once suspected them, and managers with the workers whose tips they skim.
The transient affinities that pass for affection just before the bars close and the showy displays of grief that intensify when the media are around melt and trickle away over the kerbs. But there's something left, all the same, and in this remarkable, ambitious, novel, Richard Price brings this, the Lower East Side's varied community, to pulsating life.
The full article contains 910 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
