After years failing to get engaged with any fiction, it was finally a TV series — The Wire — that made me enthusiastic enough about character and narrative to pick up a novel and actually read it all the way through. Then the natural author to go to was Richard Price, who wrote a handful of Wire episodes, and is regarded as “the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, [the US] has ever produced” and “our postmodern American Balzac who’s a whole lot funnier… and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around,” by highly regarded colleagues Dennis Lehane and Russell Banks (quotes which I lazily purloined from the blurbs on the back).
Lush Life came out in the spring to a lot of positive reviews and publicity. As in Price’s earlier novels, the story switches between the perspectives of police, criminals, and various other characters. Much of Lush Life is seen from the perspective of Eric Cash, a 35 year-old restaurant manager in Manhattan’s Lower East Side whose involvement in a major criminal investigation intervenes in the middle of (or maybe catalyzes) his coming to terms with his failure to make good on his creative ambitions as a writer.
So ya, certainly not an inappropriate book in my case. Although I’m not involved in any investigations that I know of, part of me wonders whether it might almost be worth it — to make my life at least somewhat dramatic, to give me a story to tell. There’ve definitely been occasions when I felt the possibility of being wrongly accused of something, and that feeling turned almost instantly from anxiety to anticipation of excitement.
“All these kids down here, they walk around starring in the movie of their lives, they have no idea.”
That attitude is becoming even more deeply ingrained in our culture, especially our youth culture, as virtually everone has access to tools like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for self-promotion and identity creation. The notion that the web is where The Me! Show plays on a billion channels is already a cliche — it was two years ago that Time made “You” person of the year, we’ve become used to people who are famous for nothing other than being famous, and bootstrapping oneself into that kind of celebrity has become a documented discipline– but we still haven’t seen the much wider implications and deeper insights that are still to come.
When Ortega y Gasset wrote that “man is the novelist of himself,” he wasn’t just making a glib remark about the human penchant for self-promotion and dramatization, he was trying to describe the vital, autotelic, self-making willpower that is the defining quality of human nature. Even when it doesn’t take such obvious forms, everything we do is affected by a will to become oneself, which means constantly acting in ways that make oneself relevant to others yet distinct.
It isn’t clear to me yet whether the modded-out modes of self-definition in our society — which are both technology-enabled and hyperstimulated by hormones at the same time — actually generates greater diversity or if it leads to homogenization. The large numbers of young, ambitious, creative people who gravitated to the increasingly gentrified Lower East Side for its mixture of history, varied ethnicity, and danger, had the effect of undermining the neighbourhood’s richness — its lushness — by taking the drama of life too seriously, by trying too hard to be individuals and brushing the boundaries so vigourously that they all get washed together, and the vibrancy is lost. When we turn our world into a theme park, ironically, everything becomes boring faster.
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