richard price

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petergunn

plywood violin
...figured since The Wire got so much attention, people would be down for a Richard Price thread...

i read Clockers first... think i bought it b/c i knew of the film, knew the basic plot, and it was cheap... totally blew me away... real and smart... then after reading that a few times, i got obsessed and started looking for other stuff...

read the Wanderers... so so, but very cute... a depiction of a Bronx gang in the late 50's... you just knew these were the people he grew up with...

then read "the breaks", which was more like Clockers to me, more internal...

after that read Freedomland and Samaritin, his Clockers triliogy books.. both really great (freedomland the better of the two)...

now, his new book Lush Life is out... not as good as Clockers, but better than anything else he wrote... not the location is the Lower East Side of Manhattan as opposed to the fictatious (and totally Patterson-esqu) Dempsy, NJ of the Clockers book...

funny to see him capture the LES i know... like i feel like i KNOW at least one charector in there... great pageturner, best beach reading imaginable in the world!
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
Read Freedomland last year. Very good, maybe 100 pages too long, but really tightly controlled and very believable in the way it delved into racial tensions.
 
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josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
I'm reading Clockers at the moment, about 450 pages in.

I dunno. Not as good as the Wire, for sure: much more limited in scope, really: whereas the Wire has multiple characters, Clockers really only has two narrators, who alternate. Some great moments (especially Rocco's and Mazilli's stories) and also some great ideas (The Virus as apotheosis of crime), but some clunky machinery and fairly generic prose. Not sure what the fuss is about. But I'm reading this after Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, so quite a hard act to follow.
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
josef k. said:
I'm reading Clockers at the moment, about 450 pages in.

I dunno. Not as good as the Wire, for sure: much more limited in scope, really: whereas the Wire has multiple characters, Clockers really only has two narrators, who alternate. Some great moments (especially Rocco's and Mazilli's stories) and also some great ideas (The Virus as apotheosis of crime), but some clunky machinery and fairly generic prose. Not sure what the fuss is about. But I'm reading this after Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, so quite a hard act to follow.
Click to expand...

didja finish?

yes, there are not as many arcs in Clockers as the Wire, and the acting subplot is stupid but the dialogue and imagery are vivid as hell and the plot moves as hellfire quick as any spy novel or horror novel...

basically price's genius is the dialogue and the pacing... everything else he is ok at, but he is head and shoulders above in those departments... his page turning beach reading material has a moral authority to it...
 
mesh

mesh

Amateur
I love Richard Price's stuff. I didn't know he had a new book out so that's great news. I agree about his dialogue and pacing out-weighing his other elements, but there are passages in Clockers (and Blood Brothers, which hasn't been mentioned here yet I think) that really are as vivid as any photograph.

If only London could produce a writer right now capable of capturing the feel of the city the way Price has for New Jersey,without feeling obliged to trot out a series of social cliches (Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan) or degenerating into sheer caricature (Amis and Self)

Returning to Price, I always wish he would write the dialogue for Don DeLillo, whose books always drive me mental with frustration the way he has his characters speak in statements rather than sentences. A Price-Delillo collaboration along those lines would be pure gold.
 
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josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
I did finish Clockers... Personally, I liked the actor subplot, where Rocco really humiliates himself. It was also interesting to note the parts that the Wire recycled - the drug dealers meet the cops at the movie scenes, the "goodnight crackheads" speech which Kima would later deliver in Season 5... Reading this book after reading the Wire, I found myself quite often picturing Wire actors in the guise of Clockers characters. The housing cop Thumper, for instance, was straight-up Herc...And I agree that the dialogue is great. My personal favourite is Mazili's "circle of shit" monologue.

I wonder if we could expand this thread into other Wire writers... Has anyone read David Simon's book? Or George Pelecanos?
 
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