Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060892/06089935.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 4KB | 84 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 89

BOOKS

An American Tragedy


By JOHN SKOW

    TITLE: Clockers
    AUTHOR: Richard Price
    PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin; 599 pages; $22.95

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A remarkable novel sketches broken lives
in a drug zone.


    You could call Clockers a detective story. There's a
detective and there are bad guys, some of them detectives too,
some not. There is also a crime that needs solving, which is a
slight oddity in "Dempsy," a shabby, 24-hour-a-day nightworld
located between Newark and Jersey City. Dempsy's crimes, mostly
involving drugs, accumulate in the streets like garbage, but
usually they don't require solving, just hosing away. There's
nothing mysterious about what's going on.

    But detective stories are escape fantasies. Clockers, one
of the toughest and grittiest novels of the past few years, is
no-exit reality. Richard Price, a film scriptwriter whose much
praised first novel was The Wanderers, hung out with drug cops
and drug dealers for two years, he says, listening to the talk
and watching the action. A white, middle-class reader, from a
neighborhood where people don't duck when they see a police car,
has no business saying whether Price has got things right. But
the book sounds right; it rings true. Cheap wine, the kind you
drink on the front steps, is "stoop booze." That's information
worth hanging out to hear. The plainclothes-police raiders who
roust the drug dealers two or three times a night are "the
Fury," from Plymouth Fury, the beat-up patrol car they drive.
"Dicky check" -- genital search for drugs, done in the open and
intended to humiliate -- is what the Fury imposes on the
"clockers," the young black crack sellers who retail $10 bottles
of crystallized cocaine at the edge of the Roosevelt projects.
Why clockers? Don't explain too much; this isn't a National
Geographic special; the author leaves the title's derivation
hanging.

    Ronald Dunham -- street name Strike -- is their foreman.
Or scoutmaster, or baby-sitter; one of his clockers, Horace,
13, spends his time leafing wistfully through a catalog of
kids' toys. Strike is only 19 himself, a scrawny fellow with a
stutter and a bleeding ulcer that he treats with vanilla
Yoo-Hoo. But he's smart; smart enough to know not to wear gold,
not to trust anyone, not to get greedy and not to do product,
because cocaine messes you up. He has $21,000 in cash stored
around town, and he tells himself that this is his leaving-town
fund.

    Strike isn't going anywhere, however, unless down the
drain is somewhere. He is sick with worry when Rodney, the fluky
street lord who is his drug wholesaler, tells him that Darryl,
another of his lieutenants, is cheating and must be killed --
"got to be got.'' Rodney seems to be saying Strike should do the
job, and Strike is no shooter. Then Strike hears that Darryl
has been shot and that Strike's brother Victor, a
straight-arrow who works two jobs and has never had a parking
ticket, has confessed. Rocco Klein, a white detective who's more
honest than most, decides that Victor's confession is phony and
that Strike, whom we know to be innocent, did the killing.

    In a conventional cop opera, the puzzle -- Does Victor
think he is protecting Strike, or did he somehow really shoot
Darryl? -- would be the focus, and the detective would sort it
out. Here, despite Rocco's efforts, nothing becomes clear, and
Dempsy's new accumulations of ref use obscure last week's
stains. Instead of a solution, Price leaves us with a sheaf of
memorable sketches: Dempsy's citizens, peering at the streets
from behind the broken panes of their lives. This is a superb
reportorial novel, a fine job of writing and witnessing.