Legal Commentary

Anyone can write a reasonably interesting review of a book that?s bad. It?s much harder to write an entertaining review that says why a book is good. The current issue of the New York Review of Books has a review by Michael Chabon of Lush Life, the new novel by Richard Price, that manages to do just that.  If you haven?t read any of Price?s novels but have seen HBO's The Wire (many episodes of which were co-written by Price), you?ll have a sense of the gritty urban crime world of which he is master.

Criminal law types are bound to get a particular thrill from his work. As Chabon puts it, ?[b]y now Price has the police procedural down cold, both in his technical knowledge of the workings of the criminal justice system and in his control over pacing and point of view.? What makes Price the truly exceptional novelist that he is, however, is his extraordinary ear for dialogue, ?his ability to capture and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and evanescent vocabulary of urban life. . . . Resorting with miraculous infrequency to the use of dialect spellings and other orthographical tricks, Price gets his characters' words to convey subtle nuances of class, occupation, education, even geographical gradations of neighborhood, while also using them as a powerful vehicle for the transmission, in fits and starts, evasions and doublings back, of their interior lives.?

Both his insight into the criminal justice system and his ear for language are apparent in a typically well-rendered moment described by Chabon:

Late in the novel, two members of Price's Quality of Life Task Force, a squad of plainclothes who in their bogus taxicab patrol the Lower East Side and the novel itself like meaty Furies with flattop haircuts, apprehend one of the principals in the Marcus murder, a stick-up artist named Little Dap. The kid carries in his wallet a trophy from one of his muggings: a check made out by the cashless victim for a hundred dollars, drawn on a bank in Traverse City, Michigan:

"Hey, you jux [a synonym for mug] someone from out of state? That's a guideline felony."

"A what?"

"Classical guideline felony."

"Plus this whole area is historically landmarked," Lugo reminding Daley, "which makes it. . . "

"Pre-indicted."

"As in federal."

"And federal crime. . . "

"Means federal time."

"The fuck! It's just a check, man, I ain't even cashed it!"

"They'll just take him away from us, the Feds."

"I hate those pricks, everybody's bin Laden to them. Won't even listen to us."

"I don't feel too good," Little Dap slurred.

"You're kidding me."

"Where am I?" Lolling his head, then resting on the bars.

"About two inches from a supermax."

If you haven?t read Price, Lush Life is a good place to start, though at least two of his earlier novels, Clockers and Samaritan, are arguably even better.