Maud Newton in the Boston Globe (thanks for the tip, TEV, who’s beginning a glorious run toward the release of his first novel) reminds us in her reading of Lush Life by Richard Price that noir novels are all about the mapping of city space during its phase of anxious transition: “Lush Life is a satirical but sympathetic take on existence here at what, given the subprime mortgage fiasco and concomitant layoffs on Wall Street, may be the end of the early 21st-century economic boom.”

In his review of the Price book, Walter Kirn at the New York Times begins with the same sense of change and gentrification. He is drawn more by the poetry of the language:

“Come down here, buy some smack squat from the city, do a little fix-up, have a nice big studio, rent out the extra space, mix it up with the ethnics, feel all good and politically righteous about yourself. But those lofts now? Those buildings? Twenty-five hundred square feet, fourth floor, no elevator, Orchard and Broome. Two point four mil just last week.”

Isn’t Kirn just a bit florid in his praise, though, when he says, “If fiction writing were a fairer profession, the price of such hearing would be blindness…?” Isn’t this movie language the sort of thing a would-be screen-writer would say to the mugger “Not tonight, my man”–and get blown away for it?

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