April 5, 2008

by James Woods April 7, 2008

price’s dialogue shines precisely because it isn’t how we speak.

What if, for once, we did not credit Richard Price with having a “wonderful ear for dialogue”? What if we praised his wonderful mind for dialogue instead? An “ear” for dialogue always seems to imply reportorial or stenographic prowess, the writer sitting in a bar or a bus, studiously agog for the modern mot. Henry Green, the author of perhaps the greatest English novel of dialogue, “Loving,” a book written almost entirely in the speech of Cockney servants, insisted that his job was to create, “in the mind of the reader, life which is not, and which is non-representational.”

And, indeed, one would have to get very drunk or ride on a magic bus to hear the kinds of anarchic metaphor, wild figuration, mashed slang, and frequent poetry that Richard Price creates on the page. Some parts of society may speak more pungently than others, but our usual conversation is closer to Charles Bovary’s than we might like—a sidewalk on which everyone else’s opinions and phrases have walked. Actual speech tends to be dribblingly repetitive, and relatively nonfigurative, nonpictorial. Price, by contrast, awards his characters great figurative powers, endows them with an ability to take everyone’s clichés and customize them into something gleaming and fresh. His new novel, “Lush Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26), which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Price’s apparently more formal, descriptive prose.

Of course, the author of such novels as “Clockers” and “Samaritan” (as well as episodes for “The Wire,” and several movies) has done his urban homework. “Lush Life” is set in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side, in 2003, and, like his last three novels, it is an amplified police procedural. We find a lot of society in a smallish geographic space. Cops, drug dealers, shopkeepers, businessmen, waiters, clubbers and partygoers, aspiring writers and actors are all given their own words, and one of the minor pleasures of the book is being inducted into a parallel verbal universe, in which common phrases have been exchanged for the relevant technical or street terms: not just the police’s vics, perps, collars, and wits, familiar from television, but “rack out” (stretch out to sleep), “jux” (to rob), and “tune-up” (a beating). Price is merely a good copyist when he ladles these already extant words into his text, and these days Web sites like urbandictionary.com, usefully bulging with the latest lingo, threaten to turn all of us into daring little clerks. But Price’s dialogue gets really interesting when it surges past the referential, when a character’s words are not a technical argot but a highly personal, oddly unaccountable mélange.

The effect is comic, almost absurdist. At one point, a man is explaining how advanced Jacob Riis was. In his lectures about life on the Lower East Side, he often used slides and music, a multimedia effect. The posh audience must have loved it, the man implies: “Those uptown dowagers had to be crying their balls off.” Similarly, two policemen, who are threatening a suspect with jail time, bait him by telling him that he won’t get to be a father to his new baby: “Gonna be calling some other guy Daddy. . . . You’ll be Uncle Plexiglas.” That last phrase does what metaphor should do: it acts as a fiction inside the larger fiction, speeding us toward the instant imagining of something (and wittily, too). The detectives use the same sort of technique on another collar. They tell him that unless he can lead them to a gun he’s going inside:

• 

“Yeah, but me, I’m not . . . see, you fellas, you don’t know me. All’s you saw was a black man in a hooptie holdin’ a hundred dollars’ worth of brown.”
“Don’t forget the boxcutter.”
“Like, for example, I’m a news buff. You searched my car, I probably had a newspaper in there, right? I could tell you about anything, Tyco, Amron, steroids, bin Laden, Rove . . .”
“Who’s Rove?” Daley asked.
“Shit, my girl? She’s three months heavy now with my first child. A thirty-five-year-old black man just having his first kid? You know I was waiting.”
“Well, we’re trying to help you here,” Lugo said, peering at his watch, “but it’s a gun or you might not be there for the coming-out party.”

The suspect, probably out of some combination of nerves and narcissism, keeps talking, bragging irrelevantly about being a news buff, trying to ingratiate himself, and failing to hear the detective’s question about Karl Rove. “Coming-out party” is both unexpected and absolutely right. Most readers will associate the term with society débutantes or confessions of homosexuality, but there is no reason that it should not be applied to a baby’s actual coming out of the womb, and you can see how the policeman got there.

Price is particularly good when the flat cynicism of his speakers works against the slight floweriness or literariness of their language. Here, a deputy inspector tells a detective sergeant about the hierarchy, and how the top brass sit on everything:

Berkowitz held up a hand. “Perception, reality, whatever. They’re not happy, and shit rolls downhill. They’re at the peak, I’m like mid-mountain, and you’re in this, this arroyo at the bottom. If I can be any more picturesque than that, let me know.”
“In my father’s house there are many bosses,” Matty said.
“Whatever. Hey, nobody is telling you not to go all out, just do it quietly.”

Apple… April 5, 2008

Prediction: Apple will eventually dominate the tech industry

Why I Love Twitter… April 5, 2008

I Want To Talk About Twitter………H/t Robert Scoble….

The secret to Twitter

Hello world! April 4, 2008

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!