Novelists once looked to the great authors of the past for inspiration. Not any more. Books imitate movies nowadays. Face it, Tarantino has more influence on the contemporary novel than Bellow or Updike. Students in writing programs are more likely to check out the brothers Coen than The Brothers Karamazov. And when young writers use the word epic, they aren’t referring to Homer or Virgil; more likely, the three Godfather films.
Richard Price, author of the recently published Lush Life, could serve as poster boy for this new type of fiction. Of course, Price knows the value of the big movie deal. He earned an Oscar nomination for his screenplay to The Color of Money, and more recently has written for the HBO series The Wire. Even when Price writes novels, such as Clockers or Freedomnland, the movie is rarely far behind.
In Lush Life, Price builds his story around a late night armed robbery that goes awry. The guy with the gun gets shaken when his victim decides to stand up to him, motivated by some crazy bravado that inspires him to refuse to hand over his wallet. Instead he offers the rejoinder (a great movie line, no surprise): “Not tonight, my man.” These prove to be his last words, and in the aftermath of the shooting, everybody gets involved — reporters, police department brass, family, friends, bystanders and every resident, it seems, within a two block radius of the crime scene. The detective heading the case looks on in dismay as this event blows up into a media circus.
As Lush Life demonstrates, Price is the perfect author for this cinematic type of fiction. His stories are paced to perfection. He builds this book from a kaleidoscope of discrete scenes -– there must be more than one hundred of them in the book – which are smartly balanced between moving forward the plot, developing a character, or adding the right ingredient for the moment, such as comic relief, gritty realistic details, or some intriguing sub-plot. Where other writers focus on one or two strong protagonists, Price carefully constructs more than a dozen well-defined and memorable roles. One can almost imagine which actors or actresses will be at the top of the casting director’s list of hot prospects for each of the screen parts.
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