Clockers

"The skeleton of Richard Price's bold and powerful new novel, Clockers, is a seemingly straightforward murder mystery . . . Mr. Price works enough in the way of muscle, flesh and integument to achieve a drama of quite remarkable complexity. It's clear that he has taken the dramatic skills he honed as a screenwriter and combined them with the manically energetic prose and strong sense of working-class milieu that were evident in his four previous talented novels . . . He trusts the strength of his plot . . . He narrates Clockers in a street idiom that takes a little getting used to but soon projects us forcefully into the minds of the characters . . . He makes an elaborate point of showing how the appetites of the underclass reflect the American Dream. As Strike flips through a collection of mail-order catalogues, the narrator comments: 'Strike had no real love of things for themselves, but he loved the idea of things, the concept of possession' . . . The signal achievement of Clockers is to make us feel the enormous power of these giants that are drugs, alcoholism, poverty. But of tragically equal weight in this harrowing story is the passion even in the lowest of street hustlers to do battle with these giants to the point of defeat and death."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"For almost a full 600 pages, Richard Price's Clockers hustles us through more than we thought we ever wanted to know about two of the least genteel occupations in our disintegrating inner cities—drug dealing and homicide investigation. And here's the good news: it's worth it . . . Mr. Price handles the dialogue of both worlds beautifully . . . But perhaps the novel's most impressive accomplishment is the sheer amount of exposition it deploys and controls without ever losing its narrative drive. To read Clockers is to become privy to truckloads of what seems to be authoritatively inside information—years of research apparently paying off . . . Clockers manages to come across as both clear-eyed and bighearted, able to illuminate and celebrate, in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances imaginable, a cop's heroism and a small-time drug dealer's stubborn resilience, without overly sentimentalizing either."—Jim Shepard, The New York Times Book Review

"One hell of a book."—Washington Post Book World

"Page after page explodes with a prose as vivid as kinetic art."—Chicago Tribune

"Price displays a near-perfect ear for street language . . . He gets so deep under the skin of both the cops and the clockers that it's hard to believe he himself has never been either."—People magazine

"An unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair."—USA Today

"A huge, ambitious novel about cops, kids, and cocaine . . . Price pressure-cooks the city down to its dense, searing essentials."—The Village Voice

"Any middle-aged white writer who attempts the point of view of a black teenager for more than a few pages risks being accused of minstrelsy or, worse, patronizing cluelessness, but the guilt-stricken, ulcer-ridden Strike is such a fully realized creation that spending half the book in his head becomes a pleasure. All this is the product of years of research on Price's part, both with the real clockers of the Jersey City projects and the homicide detectives who allowed him to ride along (the latter practice is quite common among crime writers, the former considerably less so). Any writer, though, can do research and come up with nothing but details and jargon; Clockers feels lived through in a way few crime novels ever do."—Scott Phillips, the author of The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway and Cottonwood

"Price has spent the past ten years writing for Hollywood—but you wouldn't know it from the dense textures and supple dramatics of this epic slice of urban grit about frazzled drug-dealers and burnt-out cops. Of the many impeccably authentic urban types here, Price focuses on two: 20-ish 'Strike' Dunham, black chief of a crew of crack-dealers ('clockers') in the dead-end burg of Dempsy, N.J., and 43-year-old white Dempsy homicide cop Rocco Klein. Each is suffering an identity crisis when a murder puts them on a collision course. Strike, in a constant panic from dealing with his homicidal boss, crack-kingpin Rodney Little, is considering changing jobs; Rocco, six months from retirement, is thinking that his life is a big zero—a nullity underlined by his humiliating antics to curry the favor of a film star who might portray him in a movie. Then someone guns down another of Little's henchmen, and—shocking both Strike and Rocco—Strike's solid-citizen older brother, Victor, confesses to the killing: 'self-defense,' he claims. Not so, thinks Rocco, who decides that Victor is covering for Strike and starts harassing the young dealer by framing him as a stoolie—certain death at Little's hands. Meanwhile, myriad subplots vivify Strike's and Rocco's worlds: Rocco initiates the film star into the horrors of jail-life; Strike apprentices a young boy into dealing; Rocco's baby girl disappears; Little's legendary hit man wastes away from AIDS; Strike nearly dies from a bleeding ulcer. Finally, Strike, with a vengeful Little literally steps behind, turns to Rocco for help—a move that allows both to find a kind of hope and renewal. A vital and bold novel rich in unexpected pleasure, with Price generally avoiding melodrama, sentimentality, and stereotype to portray a harsh world with cleareyed compassion."—Kirkus Reviews

"Selling $10 bottles of cocaine to drive-by customers, clockers are at the low end of the drug-dealing chain. One step up is Strike Dunham, an ulcer-ridden, black 19-year-old who oversees his part of the operation from a bench in the housing projects of a New Jersey city called Dempsy—the bleak and confined world that screenwriter and novelist Price explores with consistent authority. The murder of another dealer in Strike's drug organization brings in middle-aged, almost burned-out homicide detective Rocco Klein, who doesn't believe it when Strike's brother Victor, a young man with a family, two jobs and a clean record, confesses to the crime. The shooter's identity and motive are the questions on which Price turns this thoroughgoing exploration of Dempsy's dark and gritty underside, a place marked by unceasing, often random, motion and by the steady closing in of horizons. At the same time, Price plumbs the remarkably parallel interior worlds of Rocco and Strike. Although neither the hard-drinking Rocco, with a wife and infant daughter, nor the solitary Strike, who downs bottle after bottle of vanilla Yoo-Hoo to soothe his stomach pain, has a drug habit, each is as addicted—Strike to power and status, Rocco to the unpredictability and risk of his job—as are the junkies both pursue. The vividly depicted Dempsy seems a Dantean hell, at once a place and a condition from which escape may be impossible."—Publishers Weekly