Reviewed by STEPHEN JEWELL
The good Samaritan of Richard Price's seventh novel is Ray Mitchell, a successful television writer who returns to his childhood neighbourhood in rundown New Jersey in a forlorn attempt to put something back into his home town.
Price opens the novel with Mitchell teaching an after-hours creative writing
class. However, his good intentions have disastrous results when, a couple of chapters later, Price fast-forwards a month to depict Mitchell lying gravely ill in a hospital bed after being beaten nearly to death.
However, Mitchell refuses to tell anyone exactly what happened, including friendly, black policewoman Nerese Tweetie Ammons, who coincidentally happens to be an old school friend.
Price then spends the best part of 400 pages exploring how Mitchell's well-meaning attempt at being a good man, to quote the back cover, leads him down some dark avenues from which he may never return.
Unfortunately, it is hard to feel any sympathy for Mitchell. He's a pedantic fool, completely out of touch with the world around him. How such a dull nonentity could have penned a popular sitcom is beyond me, although Price has written several screenplays, including The Color of Money and Sea of Love, so is perhaps drawing on his own experience.
Considering his best-known novel Clockers was turned into a film by Spike Lee, you would expect Price's writing to be more streetwise, yet his characterisations of the black youths Mitchell teaches don't click.
If the class Mitchell teaches in the fourth chapter is any indication, it's no wonder he can't attract many students: his lesson consists mostly of a long-winded trip down memory lane about a drug-addicted cousin.
And this is where Samaritan's main problem lies. Price keeps branching out on tangents as various characters recount anecdotes that distract from the plot and create a funereal pace.
As a result, Price cannot sustain a sense of momentum and Samaritan becomes bogged down in extraneous detail. None too thrilling.
Bloomsbury, $35
* Stephen Jewell is an Auckland journalist.
