Nailed to the face of time: a review of Richard Price's Clockers.
I read Clockers by Richard Price (NY: Avon Books (a division of The Hearst Corporation; 1993; 1995 [first published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1992; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 91-43318]; ISBN: 0-380-72081-7; 630 pps.) from Friday, 22 May 2009 to Sunday, 21 June 2009.
Richard Price's epic (over 600 pages in the mass market paperback edition) novel Clockers sinks the reader deeply -- perhaps far more deeply than he thought he wanted to be -- into the daily life of a street-level drug dealer (or "clocker," in Price's street argot) and a homicide detective with a perhaps too young wife and a severe case of mid-life crisis. Essentially a slice-of-intersecting lives covering just two weeks, Clockers is less a crime novel or a mystery than it is a naturalistic (think Theodore Dreiser) look at a segment of the American underclass in a declining, fictional, mid-sized New Jersey city.
Strike is a 19-year-old clocker, ulcer-sufferer (he constantly chugs vanilla Yoo-Hoo) and protégé of his dealer/convenience store-owner boss, a Jheri curled O.G. named Rodney, who is charged with executing a wayward employee of Rodney's; Rocco is a forty-three year-old homicide detective longing to retire or change careers who finally gets recharged by his investigation of the above-mentioned murder. What follows is both more and less than what one might expect after a lifetime of TV cop (and, latterly, forensics) shows, Hollywood movies, crime novels, police procedurals and pulp thrillers, and this is both Clockers' glory and, ultimately, downfall: while the dialogue scans as utterly believable (if a little more profanely literate and witty than most of us could manage over the course of a normal day) and the events unfold with a homely realism, the anti-climactic conclusion may well leave some readers with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Price's real genius here may well be in demonstrating just how much the reader has been programmed by pop cultural treatments of this type of subject matter to want a definite conclusion to their cops-n'-criminals stories, whether good or bad.
The term "clockers" is ingenious, as every single one of the characters -- and, ultimately, the reader -- is "nailed to the face of time" (p. 582 of the mass market pb; Chapter 33) by circumstances over which they have laughably little control.
And yes, at least one sequence from Clockers was used in the HBO TV series The Wire: the "Goodnight, werewolves" bit at the end of Chapter 2 (p. 51).
Richard Price's epic (over 600 pages in the mass market paperback edition) novel Clockers sinks the reader deeply -- perhaps far more deeply than he thought he wanted to be -- into the daily life of a street-level drug dealer (or "clocker," in Price's street argot) and a homicide detective with a perhaps too young wife and a severe case of mid-life crisis. Essentially a slice-of-intersecting lives covering just two weeks, Clockers is less a crime novel or a mystery than it is a naturalistic (think Theodore Dreiser) look at a segment of the American underclass in a declining, fictional, mid-sized New Jersey city.
Strike is a 19-year-old clocker, ulcer-sufferer (he constantly chugs vanilla Yoo-Hoo) and protégé of his dealer/convenience store-owner boss, a Jheri curled O.G. named Rodney, who is charged with executing a wayward employee of Rodney's; Rocco is a forty-three year-old homicide detective longing to retire or change careers who finally gets recharged by his investigation of the above-mentioned murder. What follows is both more and less than what one might expect after a lifetime of TV cop (and, latterly, forensics) shows, Hollywood movies, crime novels, police procedurals and pulp thrillers, and this is both Clockers' glory and, ultimately, downfall: while the dialogue scans as utterly believable (if a little more profanely literate and witty than most of us could manage over the course of a normal day) and the events unfold with a homely realism, the anti-climactic conclusion may well leave some readers with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Price's real genius here may well be in demonstrating just how much the reader has been programmed by pop cultural treatments of this type of subject matter to want a definite conclusion to their cops-n'-criminals stories, whether good or bad.
The term "clockers" is ingenious, as every single one of the characters -- and, ultimately, the reader -- is "nailed to the face of time" (p. 582 of the mass market pb; Chapter 33) by circumstances over which they have laughably little control.
And yes, at least one sequence from Clockers was used in the HBO TV series The Wire: the "Goodnight, werewolves" bit at the end of Chapter 2 (p. 51).