of value in his life.

The turning point for Eric comes after the murder of Ike, when he is briefly a suspect and is subjected to a searing, lengthy interrogation by detective Matty Clark and his partner Yolonda, an experience that breaks down every illusion by which Eric had been able to continue to live on the Lower East Side. When Matty describes Eric as little more than a selfish, self-pitying, envious, and cowardly failure, who would not be above an enraged and resentful murder of chance acquaintance Ike, Eric is devastated. Now thirty-five, Eric realizes he must accept the end of his youth and the promise of his literary ambitions; furthermore, he sees the hipster downtown life as one that simply allows him to lie to himself about who he is and what he has become.

Overwhelmed by the realization that the future he had anticipated for himself will never come to pass, Eric begins to steal the tips owed his coworkers to fund his getaway from a world he now finds alienating and even frightening. As he slides weakly into the criminality Clark has suspected in him all along, Eric is rescued by his conscience. Along with his growing fear is a deepening sense of guilt so powerful that it is only when a group of thugs rob and brutally beat him that Eric begins to feel a satisfactory sense of expiation. Eric’s active conscience is something that appears to distinguish him from his friends and coworkers; in addition, unlike the others, Eric has always felt that the Lower East Side in which he has been living for eight years is haunted by the ghosts of the past, of those who were part of the old traditions brought over from Europe. The posh apartment of his boss Harry Steele is a desanctified synagogue and clearly a triumph of gentrification, and Eric is as uneasy in this contemporary tribute to the good life as he was when confronting the refrigerator Madonna. His reserve suggests that he is sensitive to issues of presumption and disrespect in a way that distinguishes him from those around him. The morally ambiguous Steele does, however, come close to being a much-needed father figure in Eric’s life, and it is Steele who gives the penitent Eric if not a second chance than at least a way out of the Lower East Side.

Steele references the issue of fathers, which is one of this novel’s important subjects. Like the fathers and father figures in this novel, Steele lives a life at a distance from that of his confused surrogate son Eric; similarly, Ike’s father, Billy Marcus, divorced from his son’s mother, is overcome by the realization that he has selfishly distanced himself from his son. The childish Billy ironically demonstrates even more adult dereliction after Ike’s death by drinking too much, abandoning his second wife and stepdaughter, and making a perfect pest of himself with the police force. The death of Ike, however, has forced Billy to own up to his faults, even as his determined downward spiral seems to be yet another bad move. Billy finds something of a soul mate in the investigating detective, Matty Clark. In pursuing this case, Matty, whose name echoes Billy’s, must face the fact that he has been wrong to distance himself from his two sons, who are about to become callow criminals; he understands that he must do something about it before it is too late.

Although by the end of this novel pervasive guilt has been established, the story does specify the orphaned Tristan Acevedo as the teenager who pulled the trigger on the gun. With his mother dead and his father absent, Tristan is living in a housing project with a callous stepfather and his new wife, who seem to retain him only because of his value as an unpaid caretaker for their small children. Tristan is given an opportunity to demonstrate some street “cred” when he is asked to join an older friend in a prowl of the neighborhood in search of likely prey, who turn out to be Ike and his buddies. The usual social pattern had ensured that Tristan and Ike are virtually invisible to each other, divided as they were along class, cultural, ethnic, and racial lines; it is only as a victim of crime that Ike finds himself face-to-face with Tristan. However, like Ike, Acevedo is unlucky in his choice of friends; it is his bullying pal who provides the inexperienced Tristan with the handgun with which he shoots Ike. In the aftermath, as was the case with Steven and Ike, the friendship is also tested and found empty. In addition, Tristan, like Ike, has artistic aspirations. He is a would-be writer of hip-hop lyrics, his voice and the voices of those like him mix in a jazzy way with the novel’s cop lingo and its patois of privileged youth. In fact, it is Price’s special talent to allow his characters to exist within their various voices, which blend and clash in a way that brings to life the entire spectrum of urban life, its low life, its high life, and its “lush life,” the last a phenomenon that suggests that the high life is never very far from its opposite.

The final major urban tribe in Price’s novel functions in a way that is both very near and quite far from such small-time criminals as Tristan. This tribe consists of the police, who keep an eye on the kids from the projects and run them to ground when necessary. The police see Ike and his friends as essentially well-to-do children on a protracted spring break, on occasion becoming the victims of the edgy teenagers from the housing projects. The job of the police is the surveillance and control of this latter groupthe novel begins, in fact, with something called the Quality of Life Task Force, who patrol the Lower East Side in an unmarked car looking for likely black and Hispanic perpetrators. It is the perspective of the police, in fact, that supplies this story with its tension and structure; this novel is on the face of it a police procedural, and there is considerable time spent seeing this world through the eyes of the troubled detective Matty and his more grounded and empathic partner, Yolonda.

Although an exciting, expertly executed crime novel on the surface, Lush Life is also a novel of conscience, both social and psychological. As a moralist, Price shows that, while the young people of any race or class have yet to develop a sense of consequence, older voices recognize that, with age and time, the wrong life will call down suffering and remorse. As a novelist with a social conscience, Price is sensitive and satiric, and at times he seems a stern Old Testament prophet, warning of numbered days. In Lush Life the police are hardly on top of very much, and even the detective of record is living a life that he must put into turnaround. In fact, each story suggests that this time in everyone’s life is about to be over or that time is running out. When the hip, downtown-Manhattan neighborhood depicted has been transplanted by novel’s end to Atlantic City as part of a new theme park, it suggests not a definitive end of days but a final, irreverent evaluation of a cultural landscape that has broken many hearts and has already lost its soul. Its shining hour seems to have lasted little longer than a New York minute.