Michiko, Is That You?

My love for Richard Price and respect for Michiko Kakutani is rock solid (The Wanderers pretty much got me through my formative years). So it pains me to say that her review of his novel, Lush Life, is awful. MK thinks it's a great book -- and I'm sure it is -- but she doesn't make the case. Instead, she vomits up copy that I will charitably assume was composed specifically to be used as a paperback blurb: "visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City."

Ugh.

I'm willing to believe that MK didn't write this and that, through some wacky editing error, what was published was actually written by a precocious high school junior. How else to explain this?

With his casual confidence and dreams of artistic success, the young bartender makes the 35-year-old Eric overly conscious of how his own life has stalled, how he is still working at a restaurant after so many years with nothing to show for it all but an unfinished screenplay. Ike reminds Eric of who he used to be, and he also reminds him of how far he’s fallen from the ladder of his dreams.

Were he not already gone, this would've killed Mailer, who would have died of laughter.