Lush Life

A Novel

"So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter...But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he always wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric on Eldridge Street one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version.

In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an X-ray of the street in the age of no broken windows and "quality of life" squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism...reads like a movie in prose" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

Fantastic book - excellent reading

This audiobook is the rare intersection of a great New York story and a contemporary gritty crime novel. Although the story would easily be successful as a plot-driven police procedural, it is lifted into a special place by its focus on characters. Those characters were given greater life by Canavale's reading. Even Canavale's slight mispronunciations are done in a true New York way (witness the way "trompe l'oeil" comes through.

This is my first Price novel, and I intend to read many more.

not bad

good, basic cop story, not as fantastic as reviews implied. No earth-shattering insights. Kind of like a long episode of The Wire. Narrator's smoker's voice is appropriate to the tone of the book, but got grating after a while.

Deep, rich work + flawless performance

If you could sum up Lush Life in three words, what would they be?

Sophisticated, intense, piercing.

What about Bobby Cannavale’s performance did you like?

Everything. He performed every character in a sprawling cast without missing a beat. Truly a spectacular performance.

Great narration by Bobby Canavale

Bobby Canavale does a great job capturing the speech characteristics of the individual characters. The street dialogue of the street kids, desperation of the father and police. Great job, look forward to more of his work.

Narrator was brilliant and made the characters come alive. Too gritty for a steady diet, but masterfully written.

The darkness of the lives in this story is painful to read about. Sad, soul-sucking lives. But the writer was amazingly graceful in his treatment; analogies are fresh and the street argot is clever and absorbing. Great writer.