Frank Bascombe

Knopf, 379 pgs.

Ultimately, it’s not Richard Price the novelist you’re likely to recognize. It’s Richard Price the screenwriter who’ll ring your bell. It’s sad, but not so sad as to detract from his talents. Some of his best work was done for the screen.

Take Harry Fabian in Night and the City. DeNiro’s performance was made real by Price’s dialogue. Who can forget his American Express riff or his line of bullshit to his drinking buddies in Boxer’s? Price delivers one memorable zinger after another. For my cabbage, his script for The Color of Money is so dead on accurate, I’ve always wondered how long he spent in a pool hall to research those characters. Sure, Fast Eddie was already living and breathing in another movie, The Hustler, but did anybody out there besides me read the book The Color of Money? How did he get that script from that book? I mean, he took some creative license, obviously, plus he had Paul Newman reprising the role, so he was playing with a bit of a marked deck. The dialogue in that movie is so rich, especially the dinner scene (the one at the beginning with Cruise, Newman and Mastrantonio), the other diner scene, (two brothers and a stranger, and the line about “if you’re too old to cut the mustard, you can at least lick the jar”) or the closing scene. They’re all so incredible, you wonder how someone like Richard Price got to be as good as he is. Oh, and forget Spike Lee’s Clockers, which was botched from the word go. Read the book, ‘cause it’s a whole other bag of goodies.

Writing novels is how he got so good, if you’re really looking for an answer. Like his Fast Eddie says, “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.” Price has a set of loaded dice, and he comes from a place where reading is big, like life’s blood, and writing, good writing, is king. In an interview, he mentioned once that while out on a ride-along, a drug dealer came up to him, picked up one of Price’s earlier novels (which he always carries while doing research) and asked him, “Whatya know for two hundred and seventy pages? Huh?”

Another good question. Would you like to find out what Price knows? Check out Ladies Man sometime. Oh my lord, is that novel a little gem. Detailing it here will do you a disservice. Buy it. That’s all. Then read it, twice. After that, start with The Breaks, which is laugh out loud funny, a thinly veiled portrait of a young Richard Price, just post college. Bloodbrothers and The Wanderers are what they are... good, but not his best work. Originally titled Darktown, Freedomland was a story torn from the headlines that no one wanted to read. It was too painful.

NEW YORK TIMES book reviewer Kakutani actually created a new word to describe it that I’ve not been able to find in a dictionary anywhere. Her review of Freedomland bordered the fanatically obsessed. She did summersaults for it, which is odd, since she only likes about three writers. Price, Delillo and Zoe Heller... oh, and Dave Eggers, and maybe Zadie Smith, whose debuts she foamed on and on about their debuts, even if she’s been not so kind since. Price likes reviews, too, especially the good ones. I heard him say after ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY gave Freedomland an A-, “What am I, back in High School?” He’s a funny guy in person. He’s a whip smart omnipresent sponge, with an observation on everything around him. You have to wonder if he ever stops taking notes on what’s going on. When his new novel, Samaritan, landed on my front door step, I knew I had something special in store. I’d been without a new Price book for a long, long time. Well, he’s paid me a visit now, and let me tell you... it was worth the wait.

Ray Mitchell is a washed-up television sitcom writer, a former snorter of the white powder, divorcee, a dad on the mend with his daughter, and an all around sport. He’s the nicest guy you’re likely to ever come across in any work of fiction. Price has a way of descriptively narrating his characters that is uncanny. He can get you thinking of something about the character long before the character does. In the short term, the character is already talking to themselves, wondering just how the cookie will crumble, how did I get here, and now that I’m here, shit, can I do the right thing?

Ray Mitchell sits amidst a wild cast of characters who all ebb and flow perfectly. Price gets six balls into the air, magically weaving together the stories of Ray’s ex, his daughter, a ninth grade creative writing class, one of his former students, a childhood friend named Nerese, aka Tweety, who turns out to be his protector, and a heart of gold hidden deep in Ray Mitchell’s chest, which on my score sheet, is way beyond the call of duty for any writer. We’ve got a white, literate, scholarly, good man as the hero, who won’t give up even if it costs him his life. A strong willed black woman serves as his “good cop.” We witness a series of philanthropic events that will, I guarantee, make your stomach turn. Ray suffers a beating at the start of this morality tale, setting in motion a dizzying yo-yo trip through his life.

We spend the rest of the book bouncing back and forth from his days as a coke-fiend cabbie to his stint as an Emmy winning sitcom writer to his love affair with a woman from “the old neighborhood,” to trying to find out, with the help of Nerese, who exactly tried to put Ray in pine box. Price makes the reader a character in his books. Like the young Vincent Spano in Rumblefish, you feel like you’re watching one incredible interaction after another. Everything that’s being said is quotable, and you’re a witness as much as any other character in the book. Nerese faces down a suspect, an “actor” as Price puts it, one of the guys responsible for the beating Ray suffered. That scene, towards the end of the book, is perhaps some of the best one on one dialogue I’ve ever enjoyed on the pages of any novel.

Price chisels, carves, caresses, nourishes, loves, scolds, develops and delivers the most incredible set of circumstances for any group of people, ever. Some of his descriptions do border on the heroic and wear sadly thin, now and again, but they are far and few between. Price once introduced Don Delillo to a throng of people at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and Rick Moody introduced Price. Price later said that giving that intro was like being the opening act for God. I don’t know about Delillo as God, but let me give a few quick definitions:

Samaritan: a good-hearted, giving person.

Ray Mitchell: the picture next to the above definition.

Richard Price: a 64 Karat gold, top of his class literary master of the street story; undisputed heavyweight champion.

The bottom line? You’ll be hard pressed to find a writer with as good an ear for how it really is on the streets as Richard Price. This book succeeds because that’s what it’s really like. There is no bullshit or fluff with Samaritan. And thank God Chip Kidd did the cover. It’s blistering, and hopefully the Stephen King letter won’t be on the back of the finished book. As long as Richard Price’s name is on the cover, that’s all you’ll need.

THE DEATH ARTIST by Jonathan Santlofer

William Morrow, 344 pgs.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine section, every week, carries an article of questions and answers with someone that is in the news. It’s a famous person sometimes, but mostly it’s someone you may not be readily familiar with.

A few weeks ago Jonathan Santlofer’s searing portrait leapt out at me, a photo of him dressed in trademark black, with a gaze that can cut glass. His Q&A was based around the subject of his first novel, The Death Artist, which among other things puts the art world on notice. Santlofer is a painter, world-renowned, a New York artist, a staple of the Soho Art scene for many, many years. I’m sure it goes against some unwritten rule for book reviewers, but I’ve got to say it. Santlofer introduced me to Richard Price’s writing, specifically Ladies Man. Santlofer was teaching in the South of France at a dismally bland and banal spin-off of the Cleveland Institute of Art, a Club Med for college kids who wanted to fool around with art. This was about ten years ago. I found myself helping one of Santlofer’s fellow professors who couldn’t even speak English, but who had been assigned to instruct the American students on the finer points of photography. Lacoste, France is a small little town, thousands of miles from New York. Santlofer was there for two months, teaching, while I was imprisoned there for a year. He’s a shockingly smart man, world traveled and wonderfully funny, and just an all around savvy New Yorker. It’s no wonder he wrote a book about his craft and the people who are unfortunate enough to populate it. When, a few days after his bio piece ran in the NYT Magazine Section, his finished novel landed on my door step, I felt a coincidentally divine urge to read it and pass along to you , dear reader, its contents.

The art world, at least as a casual observer would see it, is a place as odd, strangely obsessive, controlling, off putting, snobbish and rude as any you’re likely to observe. The gallery scenes that were perpetuated in the worldwide press in the mid 1980’s have been the basis of several movies, like Who Shot Andy Warhol and Basquiat, Julian Schnabel’s portrait of a tortured, brilliantly talented painter. It would seem to those passing by that this talk of painting, sculpture, photography, minimalism, post modernism all sounds like educated speak. You’re not in the club if you can’t rattle off the latest, greatest, hottest, and most likely to flash in the pan. Don’t worry; the art world is about as lively and vibrant right now as a housefly in late October.

What Santlofer has done is to take all these curators, museum stuffed shirts, marginal artist’s, painters, sculptors, performance artists, do-gooders and society freaks and cast them in his own tightly woven, brilliantly searing evisceration of the world that bore him. This book is the definition of biting the hand that feeds you. The nice people over at William Morrow have done this wonderfully thrilling story one better; the package is pure brilliance, wrapped in Chip Kidd designs, using the Death of Marat by Jacques Louis David, 1793, as the cover image. The book jacket is as striking and wonderfully subtle as they come, suitable for framing; it’s that beautiful.

Santlofer uses the thriller motif like a finely woven silk shirt that he drapes around his cast of art world wannabes, psychos, and up and comers. At the heart of it all is Kate McKinnon, a retired lady cop, who has not missed a trick since her days on the force. Santlofer portrays her in the most loving of ways. She’s tall, beautiful, educated, tough, tender, and vulnerable, an all around sharp-witted lady with a body to match. She carries the book, and it would be a lie to tell you that the rest of the cast of characters are nothing more than stereotypical portraits of the art world’s who’s who. Yes, he’s getting his revenge, but less than one half of one half of a percent make it in the art world, get a gallery, then go on to international fame so they can make their art for a living. That’s a really small number; Santlofer is a part of that statistic, so he’s not making fun of such an exclusive group. The revenge I speak of is given to us in the most thrilling of ways. The Death Artist the title alludes to is pursuing Kate with a plan most sinister. He’s taking famous paintings, reimagining them, and filling the subject matter in these paintings with dead bodies he’s plucked from the art world that Kate has become a part of. Our Wonder Woman, after leaving the force and getting her brain reloaded with all the art world info she could handle, manges to marry up. She starts a save the world campaign via the medium of art. She and her husband pluck two inner-city children from the barrio who’ve shown artistic talents and they give them the full ride. They do this under a canopy-like foundation, using all the socially polite and politically correct means at their disposal to carry out their plan, and in the process, Santlofer shows us why menstrual painting, Piss Christ, and Afrocentric artists are all the rage of the moment.

The pot boiling police procedural is all background for me. The heart of this novel lies in the details that Santlofer labored over for years while writing it. He describes everything about New York... the sounds of the cars on the streets, the neighborhoods, Chelsea, Soho, Alphabet City, Upper East Side, all to a perfectly drawn detail. He even makes a tuna sandwich and lettuce discarded on a cop’s desk interesting. What’s most exciting about his vision is it’s nasty, and he means it. Every character in this book is meant as a joke. He’s making the cruellest joke of all. He’s making fun of these people, and they’re too dumb to ever realize it. Each victim deserves it, and not only in the book, but also in real life. Santlofer took years to comb all his anger for the community that he lives and works in together and carefully paint it into these pages. This book is about what a ridiculous shame the whole business of art is. It makes fun of all these people who you think know more than you. I’m happy to report it’s a wonderfully sound and sharp breath of fresh air. I hope Mr. Santlofer will continue to write novels; he’s as talented a novelist as he is a painter. His prose slips along at a breakneck pace, but it would be a shame to speed read this “thriller”, when you should sit in front of it for hours, enjoying all the detail as if it were a Jackson Pollock mural on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art.

If you’ve read this far, you’re my kinda reader. Hit me with some thoughts and let’s talk!

Thanks, man. Strong words about the whole GODFATHER thing. I know I felt that way when Michael Blake announced the sequel to DANCES WITH WOLVES, and that ended up being a book I really liked. Still, that was the original author, and it was a recent book, all things considered. This is another case of cashing in a classic for the sake of a few bucks in the present. Seems a shame.

"Moriarty" out.