Genre novels are sometimes dismissed by literary folk, called inferior, lesser works designed for a mass audience rather than thoughtful consideration. It’s an elitist concept, of course, but one that has hung around for years and years despite the literary world’s affection for Edgar Allen Poe and the genre experiments of Henry James, William Faulkner and Philip Roth.
Genre, however, is just the exterior formula, a way to frame stories. The police procedural, the British-style mystery/thriller, the detective novel, the ghost story, etc., all use their long-established conventions to move their narratives along, to get the events moving, to create a dynamic that brings together characters, generates conflict and explores the consequences.
Good genre fiction –like that of James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler or Walter Mosely — structures more complex interactions, experiments with tone, language and place. Like Richard Price:
“I tend to like crime for a backbone,” Mr. Price said recently. “An investigation will take you through a landscape.”
Price’s books are large and powerful explorations of the interaction of people in dying industrial cities in the Northeast, of the racism and class conflicts, of the poses struck and actions taken because few options exist.
“Clockers” is his tour de force — a murder investigation that takes place in the fictional New Jersey city of Dempsey (loosely based on Jersey City), that offers a dead-on take on New Jersey’s law enforcement structure and racial relations. “Freedomland” and “Samaritan” are not quite as strong, but still marvelous reads that delve into the difficult issues of race and class that continue to fragment us as a society.
His touch is cinematic (not a surprise, when you consider that he is an award-winning screenwriter — “Sea of Love,” “Color of Money,” his own novel “Clockers” for Spike Lee), expressively visual.
His new novel, according to The New York Times, follows in this vein.
The landscape in this case — the subject of the book, really — is the Lower East Side, which Mr. Price depicts as a neighborhood of colliding populations: the few remaining Jewish old-timers; the people from the projects; the La Bohèmers, as he calls them, the trust-fund couples with their M.F.A.’s and videocams; the Chinese immigrants, many of them illegal, who sleep, stacked on shelves, in some of the old tenements.
The book’s hero — if you can call him that — is a 35-year-old named Eric Cash, a restaurant manager with a drug conviction who has done a little acting, published a short story in a defunct literary magazine and is now working — or rather, not working — on his screenplay. He’s modeled partly on himself, Mr. Price said. “He’s me if what has been hadn’t been. I’ve always been interested in when the hyphen disappears — you know, actor-waiter, cabdriver-writer — and you have to settle for who you are.” Every now and then you sense that Mr. Price may still feel a little hyphenated himself, with one foot in the old Lower East Side, where he no longer strictly belongs, and one foot in the present, whose permanence he distrusts a little.
The Times interview has me chomping at the bit to read “Lush Life,” though it may have to wait. I almost bought the novel over the weekend, but held off because I’m buried with other books — Rawi Hage’s “DeNiro’s Game,” Don Delillo’s “Falling Man,” Benjamin Cheever’s “Strides: Running through History with an Unlikely Athlete” and David Halberstam’s “The Children” (about the civil rights movement) all sit unfinished on my nightstand. But I’m hoping to get to it by the time I head to the Outerbanks in May for a week’s vacation.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Hank Kalet 