East Side Story

Bronx-born and -raised—his father was in the hosiery business—Price was the first member of his family to go to college. By then he knew he wanted to be a writer, but "the point of college is to get a job, and to say you want to be a writer is a little like mocking your parents." He took his undergraduate degree in labor relations, and although he went on to graduate school to study writing, he's never betrayed his sense of where he comes from. The Lower East Side, historically the stepping–off point for generations of immigrant families, is his ancestral stomping ground, so it's no accident that "Lush Life" marks the first time that this celebrated urban novelist has used a real place and not a composite as the setting for one of his books. "I've been coming down here all my life," he says, "and my generation was the last to have living contact with the Jacob Riis era. What got me when I came down [in the last four or five years] was the irony of the arrivistes coming in. A lot of immigrant stock, they grew up in Westchester or Long Island or Minnesota or wherever, and they might or might not have even a marginal notion that this is where the family started out. They're buying a gelato 20 feet from where their grandfather was arrested for mugging somebody in 1915. So there are a lot of ghosts. This is the world's most active ghost town."

"Lush Life" is a beautiful novel that gets in your face and under your skin. Tough minded and tender, often in the same paragraph, it is very much a city boy's tale, a book-length and ultimately very heartfelt love letter to a dangerous, beguiling place. It is Richard Price's way of asking, "You want a piece of me?" Believe it, you'd be crazy to say no.

© 2008