The Analysis of the Lush Life - Essay Example

Redemption Authenti on the Lower East Side is fighting for its identity. The suspenseful, heavy- handed, new book, Lush Life conjures the untamedland of the Lower East Side with the murder of a young boy, Ike Markus, and lost dreams. Richard Price is an America novelist and an author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire. He is known for his adeptness in writing dialogues which contain emotional vibe. Lush Life is a story about second chances. Each of its central characters has reached a point in life where weariness or anger has replaced hope, where the awful daily boredom of existence has become challenge enough. Eric Cash is the protagonist who runs Berkmann for the owner, Henry Steel. However, one day, two street kids pull a gun on Eric and Ike, who are on the way home from a night of drinking. These two street thugs kill Ike and Eric survives. This incident ripples through the Lower East Side and changes Eric’s life permanently. In the novel, the author chooses the Lower East Side as a setting or content of his novel. The Lower East Side is a neighborhood in the southern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It was traditionally an immigrant working class neighborhood but it has undergone rapid gentrification into a hipster neighborhood in recent years. The Lower East Side seems an ideal place for the plot because it is bordered in the south and west by Chinatown and in the north by East Village. This provides intersections for numerous and various ethic characters which make the story more complicated. In addition to the strange place, the author gives his characters lives by writing brilliant dialogues engaged in by the charismatic personalities. The author he has a talent to capture the moment like a snap shot and translates it into words. This special technique gives readers vivid pictures like visions of the Lower East Side. As thrill and heart pounding as the novel is, we can learn crucial perspectives of the urban environment. The urban environment is extremely complicated because city life requires racial interaction, survival, and escape. A myriad of interlocking people with different ethnic backgrounds live in New York. “Three kids in hoodies were sitting on the wood-slat bench before the entrance to 22 Oliver, one black, one white, one Latino, like the advance guard of a UN youth brigade, all fixedly staring at the ground with half-mast eyes,” Price writes (Price 220). This is a scene where Yolanda and Matty go to investigate a suspect in the Lemlich, one of the projects in the novel. These scene describes kids with different racial backgrounds hanging out together can be easily found in New York. Price is an intelligence writer who can see and portray everyday life of New York. America is a unique and complicated place where many different races interact with one another. For example, New York’s five boroughs are composed of patch of different ethnic neighborhoods. To a person to thrive at New York he or she requires a special communication skill to understand the characteristics of different races. This includes understanding of cultures, language, and so on. This is a complicated and acquired process which is only found in New York. Price realized the complicated states of urban life and uses the Lower East Side as the main setting of his novel. In this place all of his characters intermingle in relationships which center on the murder. The author also discusses about survival in the urban environment. “He was like a cornered rat in there,” Price writes (Price 75). Eric was held as a prime suspect for Ike’s murder at this moment. So when he ends up in an interrogation room with two New York City detectives, accused of murder, his head is spinning with confusion. In the novel, Eric Cash, a wannabe writer and restaurant manager lost his dream. After Eric spends some time in the city, his reality sinks in. No one is acting anymore. No dreams are being pursued. The unexpected incidence of Ike overwhelms Eric and throws his perception into survival. At the single moment, a hopeless dream becomes his survival. The author uses a rat as a metaphor to describe people in the urban environment. In New York, only few succeed and many fail to pursue their dreams. What is worse for everybody is that at certain times, the urban life of New York becomes a survival itself. The unrelenting pressure of the urban environment bears down upon people all the time. All of these pressures instantly collapse into one consciousness, survival. By cutting back and forth between Eric’s point of view and the points of view of kids from the area, the author empathically describes the urban environment and people’s sufferings. Price also writes about redemption of people in the urban environment; “Refugees from what. The city?” (Price 453). In the last part of the novel, the murderer is captured. During the process of capturing the murderer, Eric seeks for redemption. Eric finally escapes from New York and moves to a place far away from his dream. There, he meets a girl from the city. The complicated and harsh urban enSvironment forces every character to a breaking point. The power of the city alters dreams and the future. Every character in the novel wants to escape from the social force and atmosphere of the city. By escaping from the urban environment characters find comfort. Many people came to the city to conquer their dreams. At this point, people still dream about their future and at the same time more people’s dreams are lost in the city of hope. The author refers to people who lost dream as refugees. They are not defeated yet; they are just waiting for the right moment to recapture the lost dream. Price’s novel becomes the defining voice of New York. With his signature blend of intelligence and superb description of dialogue and passages, the author masterfully captures the collision of people and cultures within our modern day melting pot. When people from all over the world come to New York with the hope and dreams they face the new urban environment. Then, people hold on their dreams to survive. In the process of surviving, people’s destiny across and dreams are shared. In the novel, the author also deals with problems associated with the urban environment. The author emphasizes with a metaphor, the recreation of the Lower East Side to show his sympathy for losing authenticity in the Lower East Side. Furthermore, he states that the urban environment is complicated and difficult to understand. Its consequence is the denial of reality, which results in the shattered dreams of New Yorkers. Also, the author manages to describe the urban environment with his unique form and content. In the end, readers learn the complicated ways of urban lifestyle, culture, survival, and redemption. Read More