Bloodbrothers is an old American story with a new ending: an adolescent undergoes a rite de passage, then returns home instead of lighting out for the territories. Mr Price's technique mirrors this tension between freedom and captivity. On the surface the novel is liberated from decorum and cliché. The dialogue has the energetic authentic sound made familiar by [Hubert Selby's] Last Exit to Brooklyn and recent films like Mean Streets and Dog Day Afternoon. But underneath it is conventio...
At first it looks as if Richard Price is contriving extreme effects for their own sake in his first novel, "The Wanderers"…. By the end of the second story we have been treated not only to a torrent of street language that can't be sampled here and a swamp of sexual byplay that can't be described, but also to one aborted race war, one gang skirmish complete with Molotov cocktails and a scene in which two preteen-agers are threatened with mutilation of their genitals. Mr. P...
"Bloodbrothers" … is a book with a thesis: family loyalty is the ultimate treason to oneself. Like some proletarian fictions of a few decades back, this story of Stony De Coco, 18, and his clan grinds and blusters from point to point, undeterred by Price's feeling for life or his dramatic gifts. As Stony chooses between the family racket … and realizing his own possibilities in the world of strangers beyond the confines of Co-op City, the Bronx, incidents from the psychopa...
There have been stunning books about black ghetto life, but Richard Price's The Wanderers finds its own place among the chronicles of urban turmoil by focusing on a white community, one step up from the black ghetto, in housing projects on the outskirts of the bourgeois dream. These are the children of blue-collar workers who with no stigma attached to their skin, no "heritage" of slavery, still find themselves excluded from America's abundant table. The backbeat of rock'n...
[The Wanderers] could be the flip side of American Graffiti: The time is the early Sixties, the kids are high-school age, the music is the Four Seasons, Dion, Smokey Robinson—but there the similarities end. These kids live in housing projects in the Bronx, run in gangs, rumble with car aerials and straight razors, and in general lead lives sufficiently grim to make the small-town pranks and repressed sexuality of the American Graffiti crew look like material for Hans Christian Andersen. Price'...
Kenny Becker [in Ladies' Man] narrates his own story of a week-long panic that breaks out when La Donna, the woman he lives with, leaves him and forces him to share his apartment with a person he knows to be part fraud, part dreamer, a college dropout going through some premature mid-life crisis: himself. Like the untalented comedians and singers who try out for a pitiful amateur showcase in the brilliant first chapter of Ladies' Man, Becker, too, wants his place in a spotlight, to be acceptab...
Price's first book, The Wanderers … was not a great novel, but it was a stunning first novel (and not incidentally the first fiction to bring rock & roll into its characters' lives with the naturalness of Scorsese's Mean Streets). Unfortunately, Bloodbrothers, a sort of Italian working-class Catcher in the Rye, is not even a very good second novel. Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco is trying to break free of his family and become his own man, but the reader may have to strain t...
[Bloodbrothers] is a smart, professional example of the post-Selby genre of lower-depths chic. Perhaps the continuing bankruptcy of New York is behind the flowering of this school, in which your archetypal American family beat and cheat one another, drive each other bananas, and then ensure that the vicious cycle continues into the next generation…. As one of the more detached characters puts it, 'the whole fuckin' Bronx is like a combination open-air loony bin an' Red Cross disa...
Richard Price has an amazing ear and eye for the street. He presents us [in "Ladies' Man"] with a cityscape that is filled with powerful spooks…. Richard Price collects the dung and scrap heaps of our urban culture in a frightening, electrical style. But the book's main problem is Kenny himself; Kenny gets in the way of the narrative with his 50-cent truths. At times he sounds like a hip Benjamin Franklin in platform shoes, dreaming wise thoughts as he gobbles on a stale r...
Ah, to be 24 and have written "The Wanderers." To have captured the essence of the urban-American dream. To have taken a theme as old as the novel itself—the loss of innocence—and fashioned it as few have before. Ah, to be 24-year-old Richard Price and have written one of the few powerful and worthwhile novels of the year…. The language of "The Wanderers" is tough, the gang's actions often crude and vulgar. But it is an important novel for just those r...
In two earlier books … Richard Price has documented the proud, cheerless world of New York City's white working-class youths, and the special bind of high school camaraderie. In Ladies' Man that mystique emerges, ambivalently, as the romantic anchor for Kenny's faltering confidence. Price risks everything on the persuasiveness of his hero's voice, for the plot is static and the story has all the structure of a skin flick (which may be intentional). Kenny's speech ve...
Since the De Cocos, Price's main characters [in Bloodbrothers], and I live in the same borough, I am reluctant to admit that my fellow Bronxites realistically and constantly talk, think and act this dirtily. That aside, some of Price's episodes are achingly moving, especially when Stony, the hero, talks to the kids in the hospital and when Chubby, his uncle, reminisces. Will Stony become an electrician, like his dad and uncle? Or a worker with hospitalized children? Memorable minor characters ...
Richard Price, with a raunchy humor that smarts from the slap of reality, writes of growing up Italian in the Bronx during the early Sixties. He focuses on a teenage gang called the Wanderers as they skirmish through playgrounds, candy stores, and deserted lots during their last year together. [The Wanderers is] a snappily paced novel that beats with the rhythm of street patter. And the sewer-mouthed boys who spit it out are characterized with deftness and economy….
Ladies' Man is an effective depiction of loneliness, and Richard Price is an expert on the fulsome and frenzied aspects of New York City. Kenny Becker is a perfectly conceived character; so perfect, in fact, that he is thoroughly unpleasant to listen to at book-length. The clichés, the hipness, the latest urban argot, the masculinity so overweening that it whines—in short, the unrelenting gracelessness, however true to the social type Kenny represents, demands a high degree of tolerance...
[Bloodbrothers is a] tough, dramatic novel about an Italian-American working-class family and a son's attempts to break out of a ruinously confining value system centered on mawkish or brutal (nothing in-between) images of masculinity…. The style is strictly "naturalistic," the momentum energetic, the mood at once gritty, funny, and quite horrendous. The novel's considerable force also derives from its authenticity: Price clearly knows what he is talking about, both the su...
