A master at work

It’s pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you’re in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive. Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and written sentence by sentence without a false note or a moment of drag.

In the opening chapter we are introduced to the ‘Quality of Life Task Force’ — a team of four undercover cops ‘in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run’. As the figure of speech suggests, they’re fishing — random car-stops, hoping to pull guns, dope, knives. They are, not that we’re to know it yet, bit- part players; but they give Price the opportunity to establish his scene and his scope.

The description of how they patrol, in a single long paragraph, at once recalls and dispatches the sort of poetic, consciously virtuosic coast-to-coast panning shot that opens Rick Moody’s The Diviners.