Freedomland
InFreedomland, Richard Price returns to the gritty terrain he first explored inClockers. This time, the  fictional (but all too convincing) urban eyesore of Dempsy, New Jersey, is convulsed by  a high-profile carjacking. A single mom named Brenda Martin insists that a man stopped  her car, yanked her from behind the wheel, and drove off with the vehicle--and her young  son. Behind these horrific facts looms another: the victim is white and the perpetrator is  black. Immediately the racial calculus of American life comes to bear on the crime,  which becomes a focus for long-smoldering animosities. As a three-ring circus of media,  cops, and gawkers converges on the crime scene, Dempsy and the adjoining white  community of Gannon seem primed for an explosion. Price passes the narrative baton back and forth between Lorenzo Council, an ambitious  black detective, and Jesse Haus, a no-less-ambitious reporter for the local paper.  Lorenzo's street-smart, agitated voice is the more convincing of the two. Jesse, with her  frantic compulsion to squeeze local color from the crisis, never quite attains three  dimensions--although her outsider's relationship to her material suggests some faint,  fascinating echo of the author's. In any case, Price allows the story to proceed at an  irresistible slow burn. His ear for dialogue is as sharp as ever, and nobody casts a colder  or more accurate eye on our fin-de-siècle urban existence.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.