Lush Life

A Novel

By: Richard Price

Narrated by: Bobby Cannavale

Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

What do you do?

Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers: artist, actor, screenwriter....But now he's 35 years old and he's still living downtown, still in the restaurant business, working night shifts and serving the people he always wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike Marcus had what the Lower East Side wanted: he was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, and he wouldn't say "tend bar". He was going places, and he was going to live forever - until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric on Eldridge Street one night and pulled a gun. Ike's last words were "Not tonight, my man".

At least, that's Eric's version.

©2008 Richard Price (P)2008 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Price writes with the slightly manic desperation of someone determined to tell the absolute truth....This heightened, anxious awareness of moral and psychological complexity is one of the great accomplishments of first-rate writing." ( The New York Times Book Review)

Brilliant

Gritty NYC with Brilliant dialogue throughout- first book by this Author but already big fan-

I want Bobby Cannavale to narrate my life

A picture of New York you'll never forget. Price gets at the heart of everything you want the city to be and then digs into exactly what it is.

Great voice

The reader had a good voice but the author had a great voice. The language of New York was so rich. I really enjoyed listening to this book.

Brilliant

"Lush Life" is a fine, possibly great novel about a homicide investigation, set in the lower east side of Manhattan. The story is told, in the third person, from the point of view of a NYPD detective. I live in Manhattan and work as an attorney in law enforcement. I talk to and work with NYPD officers and detectives every day. Because I don't actually go out on rides with cops, I cannot tell you if the novel is accurate as to what it feels like to work as a NYPD detective, but this book is totally accurate, to the smallest detail, of what it looks like.

The writing is first rate, and could be fairly categorized as "literary fiction" as well as crime fiction. And the narrator is excellent. His accent is pitch perfect, and he reads with sympathy and understanding. If you are interested in the crime genre, literary fiction, police officers, and especially, if you, like me, are completely in love with New York City, you will love this book.

Made for TV

I wonder if I didn't know that this author wrote for TV, I would have felt so strongly that this book reads like a screenplay. And I've never even read a screenplay! But the book does feel like a script-- I can envision the characters, the dialogue snaps and throttles. The characters are, in fact, primarily defined through their dialogue. This gets to be tough in a narration where the very good reader bleeds and blends scenes together without pause-- sometimes a character you think is the focus is so obviously not that it's startling. I suspect in the text of the book itself (or in an actual film) it's more obvious when the point of view shifts, but the problem with this narration is...again and again I didn't realize we were on to a new character.

This is a fast-paced, visually evocative read...but I hesitate to write "read." It's a performance, and I assume the movie will follow!

Unnecessarily convoluded

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

If trapped on a long drive and this were one of the five last audio books available from the truck stop selections, I would chose it over several other options, especially if they involved NASCAR, Golf or analysis of intergalactic thermodynamics as the same impacted the French Revolution.

What about Bobby Cannavale’s performance did you like?

Narration was good, clear and at a reasonable pace.

Was Lush Life worth the listening time?

3 out of 5. I found it hard to get involved with the characters initially, and the use of nicknames or oblique references (i.e. "Quality of Life" -- I probably didn't have a good handle on what this meant until the last 20% of the book) is at times annoying. It was OK, but I won't keep it on my iPhone to repeat. It wasn't bad, and was even OK -- but it wasn't spectacular.

Any additional comments?

The ending was abrupt and unfulfilling. I went back to Audible to find out if there was a Part 3 to the book that I'd overlooked. It did not feel resolved and, having finally developed some attachment to the characters, I felt a bit cheated when it just stopped. I suspect this is a characteristic of the author, and will probably weigh that heavily when determining whether to listen to another book by this author or not.

One of the best

This is an amazing book. The author has an amazing ear for dialogue and the story never drags. I wonder if you have to have spent some time in lower Manhattan to truly appreciate how well he renders the scene, but even if you have not, this book will not disappoint.

superb narration

This is a good "airplane novel", entertaining and witty. The narration is simply superb, right up there with the late lamented Wolfram Kandinsky.

Okay

This was a good book, but it did not live up to the reviews it got when it was published. I found it hard to care about what happened....

Very good

Great story and great story teller. Very good book!