Though it's almost impossible to find a New York City neighborhood that hasn't become a proverbial melting pot of disparate social, economic, and cultural groups, Manhattan's Lower East Side is a prime example of this ongoing amalgamation. The idealist imagines that these groups intermingle and cohabit the neighborhood happily and peacefully, grateful and even proud of the diversity. The cynic, on the other hand, envisions the neighborhood as a powder keg, with the different groups permanently on the verge of exploding into all-out war.

In his most recent novel, Lush Life, Richard Price finds value in both of these perspectives while traversing the wide gray area between them. The story's effectiveness derives from a cast of characters who represent every conceivable walk of life: detectives who are as different from one another as can be, yet are all somehow born to be cops; stuck-up kids and wannabe gangsters who eventually fall into crime for myriad reasons; immigrants who want to make their money and remain invisible; landlords and businessmen who cash in on gentrification; and, of course, aspiring artists and young professionals who flock to the area for the same ephemeral sense of bohemian coolness. Each of these characters has been affected by the murder of an optimistic young poet/bartender, and their stories overlap in gut-wrenching vignettes. To delineate the plot any further would reveal too much, and, furthermore, the plot is not even the locus of the novel.

Through Price's writerly precision, the neighborhood itself becomes a central character — one that, at times, resembles a Shakespearean tragic hero — in this densely layered lesson on both the complexity of interpersonal relationships and our willingness to ignore them. Despite the dark subject matter, Lush Life is not an indictment; Price doesn't write in order to damn the culture — he is just its loyal documentarian.

-Tom Roberge