Friday Fiction: Richard Price

--by Hanje Richards

Richard Price’s novels explore late 20th century urban America in a gritty, realist manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. Several of his novels are set in a fictional northern New Jersey city called Dempsy.

.

.
.

Blood Brothers - Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly-knit world of New York's construction unions, or take off and find his own path. But Stony’s family is not about to make that choice easy. As he tries to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital – a job that promises not to make anyone happy but Stony.

Clockers - Epic slice of urban grit about frazzled drug-dealers and burnt-out cops. Of the many impeccably authentic urban types here, Price focuses on two: 20-ish "Strike'' Dunham, black chief of a crew of crack-dealers ("clockers'') in the dead-end burg of Dempsy, NJ, and 43-year-old white Dempsy homicide cop Rocco Klein. Each is suffering an identity crisis when a murder puts them on a collision course.

Freedomland - Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting?

Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career.

As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and the mostly-white neighboring town, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story.

At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience –dislocated, furious, yearning – as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.

Lush Life - A tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the "other" lower east side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidiscopic portrait of the "new" New York.

.

.
.

Samaritan - Ray Mitchell, a former TV writer who has left Hollywood under a cloud, returns to urban Dempsy, New Jersey, hoping to make a difference in the lives of his struggling neighbors. Instead, his very public and emotionally suspect generosity gets him beaten nearly to death. Ray refuses to name his assailant, which makes him intensely interesting to Detective Nerese Ammons, a friend from childhood, who now sets out to unlock the secret of his reticence. Set against the intensely realized backdrop of urban America, the cat and mouse game that unfolds is both morally complex and utterly gripping.