Books, Arts & Manners: America Narcotica

Clockers, by Richard Price (Houghton Mifflin, 599 pp., $22.95)

CLOCKERS arives with a press kit, a cardboard folder that might have held silk stockings; raises on its first page a non-literary matter: agent Lynn Nesbit’s legs, “the best,” says Liz Smith, “in the literary business.” Then you learn how much Richard Price likes toughness, and how much Martin Scorsese paid him for the screen rights. Get it straight: this is a self-consciously hard-driving guy who nonetheless, in an earlier novel, could write something as awkwardly delicate as “Everything still had that post-rain placental shimmer to it, enhanced by the deepening slant of the late afternoon sun.”

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Paul West

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Clockers, by Richard Price (Houghton Mifflin, 599 pp., $22.95)

CLOCKERS arives with a press kit, a cardboard folder that might have held silk stockings; raises on its first page a non-literary matter: agent Lynn Nesbit’s legs, “the best,” says Liz Smith, “in the literary business.” Then you learn how much Richard Price likes toughness, and how much Martin Scorsese paid him for the screen rights. Get it straight: this is a self-consciously hard-driving guy who nonetheless, in an earlier novel, could write something as awkwardly delicate as “Everything still had that post-rain placental shimmer to it, enhanced by the deepening slant of the late afternoon sun.”