Literary.

"[T]he people who inhabit [Banks's] meticulously rendered scenes seem far less real than their surroundings, and their story leaves much to be desired in the way of plausibility. ... By the time you reach the end of The Reserve, it has come to seem contrived and evasive." FRANK WIlSON

New York Times *

"Mr. Banks has struggled to concoct a plausible narrative, almost randomly threading one colorful incident and set piece after another onto a slender string. ... [A] cheesy, histrionic novel, a novel unworthy of a writer with as many gifts and as impressive a track record as Russell Banks." MICHIKO KAKUTANI

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Though Pulitzer Prize--winning Russell Banks made his name writing about the down-and-out, blue-collar side of Adirondack society (The Sweet Hereafter, Cloudsplitter), The Reserve represents a rare foray into chronicling the lifestyles of the rich and morally depraved. Inspiration for the novel's many plot twists and turns (and even more twisted characters) reportedly came from sources as varied as the life of flamboyant leftist artist Rockwell Kent to rumors about Ernest Hemingway's troubled affair with a gorgeous but unstable mistress. Unfortunately, the New York Times expressed a majority opinion when it stated that the many threads of the story just didn't coalesce, resulting in a mere "potboiler" with "silly and stereotype[d]" characters--a world away from Banks's best work.

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****

Lush Life

By Richard Price

Gritty urbanism.

While barhopping one night in Manhattan's Lower East Side, 35-year-old Eric Cash, a failed writer and burned-out restaurant manager, witnesses his charismatic coworker Ike Marcus being gunned down in an attempted robbery. Arrested for the crime, Eric is released when a witness corroborates his story, but, forever changed, he starts down the path toward self-understanding. More than the crime itself, Lush Life follows the lives of hard-drinking NYPD Detective Matty Clark, the two suspected killers--abused street kids from a nearby housing project--and Ike's anguished father, Billy, as it casts a scathing eye on the neighborhood's violence, class inequalities, and torn social fabric. In the process, Lush Life asks tough questions about survival--and identity--in 21st-century Manhattan.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 456 pages. $26. ISBN: 0374299250

Hartford Courant *****

"Reading Lush Life ... is a lot like watching a great movie, with the author as director and cameraman. ... The story swirls and circles, as cops and killers and central and peripheral characters brush up against each other, often unknowingly, while the plot relentlessly winds tighter and tighter." CAROLE GOLDBERG

New York Times *****

"Mr. Price puts his myriad gifts together to create his most powerful and galvanic work yet, a novel that showcases his sympathy and his street cred and all his skills as a novelist and screenwriter: his gritty-lyrical prose, his cinematic sense of pacing, his uncanny knowledge of the nooks and crannies of his characters' hearts." MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Wall Street Journal *****

"[N]ever before has he used his gifts together (dry comic observation, blunt dialogue, vivid characterization) as expertly as he does in this wholly credible, therefore unsparingly funny, portrait of Gotham in our own decade. It's Bonfire of the Vanities 2.0." KYLE SMITH

Cleveland Plain Dealer ****

"Price is funny and profane, displaying a large talent for story-telling and a genuine gift for empathy through a welter of clashing, cultural and class perspectives." MICHAEL KRONER

Los Angeles Times ****

"For Price, then, the social novel is also a crime novel, or maybe it's just that in the intersection between criminality and citizenship we get our truest sense of what the city means. ... Still, for all his observations of the city and his insights into the tensions of a changing neighborhood, Price can't quite bridge the gap between this social novel and the subtleties of real life." DAVID L. ULIN

San Francisco Chronicle ***

"While Price has gotten two levels of contemporary New York down expertly--the perps and the cops--he never manages to find the poetry in the aspirers, the would-be novelists and screenwriters (the would-be Richard Prices) so intrinsic to his conception. ... This is clearly a writer who has spent a lot of time hanging around precinct rooms and driving in squad cars, and he's discovered that the talk is a lot richer in such places than in your typical Manhattan watering hole." ANTHONY GIARDINA

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Richard Price deftly explores the urban world in his novels and screenwriting (Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan, *** Mar/Apr 2003, and HBO's The Wire), but critics agreed that Lush Life is perhaps his finest work of social realism yet. Compared to Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities for its adept intertwining of the crime and social novel, Lush Life just might be "the greater achievement" (Wall Street Journal). While offering a panoramic view of class and social tensions in Manhattan, Price also draws deep, rich characters (only one reviewer criticized the aspiring-artist persona). Price's dialogue and interior monologues--from street slang to the vernacular--are simply stunning. A few reviewers cited some melodrama that detracted from Price's social-realist goal, but no one disputed the perfectly executed ending.

CITED BY THE CRITICS

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES | TOM WOLFE (1987): In 1980s New York City, a wealthy, arrogant white bond trader hits and kills a black youth with his Mercedes--then runs from the scene. Soon, his fate converges with a Jewish DA, a British journalist, a black politician, and an angry, racially divided city.

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****

The Commoner

By John Burnham Schwartz

Life in a gilded cage.

In the late 1950s, Haruko Endo, the only child of a wealthy saki merchant, catches the eye of the crown prince at a tennis tournament. After a brief courtship, she accepts the prince's proposal of marriage and becomes the first commoner to marry into the 2,000-year-old Japanese monarchy. Reviled for her common birth by courtiers and treated with cruelty and contempt by her mother-in-law, the empress, Haruko tries to adjust to life in the imperial palace despite its endless rituals and stultifying restrictions. Thirty years later, she is empress herself, and when her son, the crown prince, confesses his love for another commoner, Haruko faces a terrible choice.

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Nan A. Talese. 368 pages. $24.95. ISBN: 0385515715

Washington Post *****

"Readers should be delighted. Schwartz has written a mesmerizing novel full of tenderness and compassion, one that convincingly invests the Japanese empress's voice with all the nuance it demands." KUNIO FRANCIS TANABE

Christian Science Monitor ****

"Since Schwartz hues closely to the few facts known about the Empress Michiko, who met her husband on a tennis court and is rumored to have lost her voice for months during the 1960s, readers may have an uncomfortable feeling of eavesdropping where they clearly aren't wanted. ... The trend of mixing history with fiction can make for fascinating, intellectually rich reading, and Schwartz's delicately rendered novel is nowhere near Kitty Kelley or Andrew Morton territory." YVONNE ZIPP

Denver Post ****

"An American taking on a fictional memoir about a living Japanese empress is a gutsy move, but Schwartz makes it work. ... While the external details of life in the palace remain stunning, it's Schwartz's grasp of [Haruko's] internal struggle that resonates after the last page is turned." ROBIN VIDIMOS

Los Angeles Times ****

"Schwartz handles the physical details effortlessly, but his silken style lends itself best to the creation of internal life from whole cloth. You can sternly remind yourself every few pages that this is fiction, or you can relax and enjoy the fantasy that you are privy to two of the most private public lives in the world." JANICE P. NIMURA

Milwaukee Jrnl Sentinel ****

"No question, Schwartz is a masterful novelist, especially adept at first-person narration. At no time do we doubt we are hearing Haruko's daring, intelligent voice, analytical and sure." MARY-LIZ SHAW

Wall Street Journal ****

"His book will inevitably be compared with Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (1997), but Mr. Schwartz's work is more delicate and graceful. Haruko's voice is--at least to this American reader--strangely persuasive, and her world view consistent with that of someone with her upbringing." BROOKE ALLEN

USA Today ****

"Like the ornate trappings of the palace, sometimes the imagery is too rich, and the ending stretches credulity. But, even so, Schwartz opens a gilded window into a seldom-seen world and the traditions that have sustained a monarchy through centuries, only to threaten the young lives needed to carry it into the future." SUSAN KELLY

CRITICAL SUMMARY