Whites (Price)

The Whites 
Richard Price (wiriting as Harry Brandt), 2015
Henry Holt & Co.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805093995


Summary
The electrifying tale of a New York City police detective under siege—by an unsolved murder, by his own dark past, and by a violent stalker seeking revenge.

Back in the run-and-gun days of the mid-1990s, when a young Billy Graves worked in the South Bronx as part of an aggressive anti-crime unit known as the Wild Geese, he made headlines by accidentally shooting a ten-year-old boy while struggling with an angel-dusted berserker on a crowded street.

Branded as a loose cannon by his higher-ups, Billy spent years enduring one dead-end posting after another. Now in his early forties, he has somehow survived and become a sergeant in Manhattan Night Watch, a small team of detectives charged with responding to all post-midnight felonies from Wall Street to Harlem. Mostly, his unit acts as little more than a set-up crew for the incoming shift, but after years in police purgatory, Billy is content simply to do his job.

Then comes a call that changes everything: Night Watch is summoned to the four a.m. fatal slashing of a man in Penn Station, and this time Billy’s investigation moves beyond the usual handoff to the day tour.

And when he discovers that the victim was once a suspect in the unsolved murder of a twelve-year-old boy—a savage case with connections to the former members of the Wild Geese—the bad old days are back in Billy's life with a vengeance, tearing apart enduring friendships forged in the urban trenches and even threatening the safety of his family.

Razor-sharp and propulsively written, The Whites introduces Harry Brandt—a new master of American crime fiction. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Gotham Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Richard Price is an American novelist and screenwriter, known for the books The Wanderers (1974), Clockers (1992), Lush Life (2008), and The Whites (2015, writing under the pen name of Harry Brandt).

Early life
A self-described "middle class Jewish kid," Price was born in the Bronx, New York City and grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967 and obtained a B.A. from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia University. He also did graduate work at Stanford University.

He has taught writing at Columbia, Yale University, and New York University. He was one of the first people interviewed on the NPR show Fresh Air when it began airing nationally in 1987. In 1999, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, receiving the academy's Award in Literature that year.

Novels
Price's novels explore late 20th century urban America in a gritty, realistic manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. Several of his novels are set in a fictional northern New Jersey city called Dempsy. In his review of Lush Life (2008), Walter Kirn compared Price to Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow.

Price's first novel was The Wanderers (1974), a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx in 1962, written when Price was 24 years old. It was adapted into a film in 1979, with a screenplay by Rose and Philip Kaufman and directed by the latter.

Clockers (1992), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was praised for its humor, suspense, dialogue, and character development. In 1995, it was made into a film directed by Spike Lee; Price and Lee shared writing credits for the screenplay.

Screen plays
Price has written numerous screenplays including The Color of Money (1986), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, Life Lessons (the Martin Scorsese segment of New York Stories) (1989), Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1993), Ransom (1996), and Shaft (2000).

He also wrote for the HBO series The Wire. Price won the Writers Guild of America Award award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony for his work on the fifth season of that series. He wrote the screenplay for the 2015 film Child 44. He is often cast in cameo roles in the films he writes. His eight part HBO mini series CRIME began filming in Sept. 2014

Price did uncredited work on the film American Gangster, wrote and conceptualized the 18-minute film surrounding Michael Jackson's "Bad" video.

Other
He has published articles in the New York Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Village Voice, Rolling Stone and others.

In July 2010, a group art show inspired by Lush Life was held in nine galleries in New York City.

Personal life
Price lives in Harlem in New York City, and is married to the journalist Lorraine Adams. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/22/2015.)

Book Reviews
[R]iveting…. [Price] not only has a visceral ability to convey the gritty, day-to-day realities of [his characters'] jobs, but also a knack for using their detective work the way John le Carre has used spy stories and tradecraft, as a framework on which to build complex investigations into the human soul…. No one has a better ear for street language than [Price] does, and no one these days writes with more kinetic energy or more hard-boiled verve. His high-impact prose is the perfect tool for excavating the grisly horrors of urban life…And his ability to map his characters' inner lives—all the dreams and memories and wounds that make them tick—results in people who become as vivid to us as real-life relatives or friends…. [The Whites] is, at once, a gripping police procedural and an affecting study in character and fate.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


[A]s much an entertaining story as it is an examination of the job of policing…. The novel posits a simple axiom: Those who go into darkness as a matter of course and duty bring some measure of darkness back into themselves. How to keep it from spreading like a cancer, eating at your humanity, is the police officer's eternal struggle. It's this struggle that [Price] places at the heart of his storytelling. Another great so-called crime novelist, Joseph Wambaugh, has said that the best crime novels aren't about how cops work cases, they're about how cases work cops. This holds true, with fervor, in The Whites…. The routine of police procedure…is just right, depicted in its perfect shopworn way. And the dialogue…reaches the high-water mark of previous Richard Price novels…. The Whites is a work of reportage as much as it is a work of fiction…. It tells it like it is. It provides insight and knowledge, both rare qualities in the killing fields of the crime novel. It's a book that makes you feel that Price has circled the murders at this detective's side and in the process really gotten to know a city.
Michael Connelly - New York Times Book Review


A maze of a novel that alternates between scenes of intense introspection and scenes driven by dialogue…. It is not, finally, a novel of clearly delineated solutions but a novel of conscience, fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity.
Joyce Carol Oates - The New Yorker


Seven years is too long for New Yorkers to wait for the next book from Richard Price but he’s finally here again with a stunning NYPD novel….The Whites is grippingly immersive, its characters and the world they move through, indelible.
New York Daily News


(Starred review.) A gripping, gritty, Greek tragedy of cops, killers, and the sometimes-blurry line between them… Price is one whale of a storyteller by any name… The author skillfully manipulates [his] multiple story lines for peak suspense, as his arresting characters careen toward a devastating final reckoning.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) This is going to be a strong contender for best crime novel of 2015…. With one-of-a-kind characters and settings so real you can smell them....it’s supercharged with complications…. In the end, The Whites isn’t about cops and killers so much as it is about the damage we all carry [and] the sins we’ve all committed.
Booklist


Fasten your seat belt… Old tragedies combine with fresh ones in Brandt's steely-jawed, carefully constructed procedural. Few crime novelists are as good at taut storytelling as Richard Price…. In the wake of rage and sorrow, ordinary people respond by going crazy and screwing up. In this far-from-ordinary novel, Price/Brandt explores the hows and whys.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.)

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they more one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you, the reader, begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers are skillful at hiding clues in plain sight. How well does the author hide the clues in this work?

4. Does the author use red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray?

5. Talk about plot's twists & turns—those surprising developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense? Are they  plausible? Or do the twists & turns feel forced and preposterous—inserted only to extend the story.

6. Does the author ratchet up the story's suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? How does the author build suspense?

7. What about the ending—is it satisfying? Is it probable or believable? Does it grow out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 2). Or does the ending come out of the blue? Does it feel forced...tacked-on...or a cop-out? Or perhaps it's too predictable. Can you envision a better, or different, ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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