Samaritan

Rating:
Summary: A Story of Stories But Not Much Plot!
Review: Samaritan is another very well wriiten story of urban life, but not up to par with Freedomland and, particularly, Clockers. Price's ability in developing characters that stay with you long after you finish his books and his strength in writing dialogue that is very true-to-life is of a caliber that is unequaled by most popular fiction writers writing today. He has developed stories of his main and minor characters that are very interesting, all of which are intertwined with that of his protagonist, Ray Mitchell. What is lacking for me in Samaritan, and which keeps me from giving it a higher rating, is the development of a very interesting plot. What kept me reading this book was the high quality of Price's writing (5 stars), not the plot itself (3 stars). For me, Clockers and Freedomland, deserved 5 stars on both important factors. Nonetheless, Samaritan is a book worth your time and money. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: A Good Old Fashioned Story
Review: Somebody brained Ray Mitchel, nearly beat him to death, someone he knows, but when he wakes in the hospital, childhood friend, but now lady cop Nerese Ammons, wants to know who and why, but Ray isn't talking, he seems more afraid of the truth that catching someone who tried to kill him.

Ray, a successful writer, has recently returned to his childhood home of Dempsy. Since he's been back he's reunited with his estranged teenage daughter, started a romance with a woman from the projects and is teaching writing to bored high-school kids. However Ray is a needy soul and his judgment is usually pretty bad. He lends money to anyone, deserving or not, and his kind deeds all seem to backfire.

Nerese, a black tough-minded single mother and a good detective, is close to retirement, but is determined to crack this case, if only because Ray once did her a kind deed when they were both kids in the projects.

SAMARITAN is often somber, deals with serious emotions, is sometimes funny and Price certainly knows how to draw likeable, but flawed characters that are believable and easy to understand. And it's easy to understand why many think that Richard Price is simply one of the best writers writing today. I know that's my belief.

Jeremiah McCain

Rating:
Summary: from the heart
Review: The Manhattan skyline across the river from Ray's terrace is a spectacular backdrop for characters wrestling with conflicts between generations and classes in the shadow of the fallen Trade Center. Even when they strike out at each other, the people in this wonderful novel search for love and forgiveness. From an intensive care hospital room to an urban school to a park bench in the projects, the sensory details bring it all home to the reader. This is one of those books where you slow down halfway through because you don't want it to end. Thanks for this, your best book yet, Mr. Price.

Rating:
Summary: No good deed goes unpunished
Review: The NY Times wrongly disses this book, calling it "hollow" and saying Price gives away the theme in the Epigraph, a Bible quote.

I'll spare you the King James; here's a modern English translation of the epigraph:

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. "

Safe to say, our hero, Ray, doesn't heed those words and, thus, a fine novel ensues. Price shows us what can go wrong when neediness occurs on both sides of the charitable transaction. For Ray, a simple "thank you" from God in heaven is not enough. He wants it here and now.

Despite the Times complaint cited above, I don't think Price spoon-feeds us here. He thrusts us into the middle of what seems an unfair situation (paraphrasing one of the characters here, we may find ourselves wondering, "what'd he do??") and slowly allows us to see the flaws at Ray's core -- flaws in an otherwise good man.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling mystery
Review: The setting is dark. We are drawn into an "inner city" world, a world of poverty, squalor, drug addiction, violence.

And yet in some ways, this world is sometimes transformed into a utopian cloud. There is no racism in this world. The white, in fact Jewish, father, feels perfectly safe walking through it after dark with his pre-teen daughter. Excuse me, what world is this?

In a park, in the dark, this white man and his young daughter have no fear or caution in the presence of a group of male teens who could pose any number of threats. Let's not confuse racial harmony and idealism with blindness and insanity. No, you don't take your 12 year old girl there at night and then talk loudly in order to attract the attention of the boys in the park.

To increase the racial utopianism, there are inter-racial romances here. Apparently in Newark NJ or its clone (aka Dempsy, in this book) the races are all just one big happy family, perfectly at ease with each other, and hopping into bed.

The story is very well written. You are carried along, even though the time line is choppy. We go from one date to another, from past to future to past to middle. By the end of the book we are placed firmly in the middle, when the big assault occurs.

You can learn a lot about the storyline from the other reviews on this site, some really detailed and excellent.

Halfway through the book I found myself counting the prime suspect out. There is one prime suspect, so obvious, and since we are reading a novel and not experiencing real life, it was apparent to me that the prime suspect can't possibly be the assaulter. I considered it a strike against the author, that he most likely followed the old formula of misleading the reader about the guilty party. I expected a surprise ending. They all have them. The culprit must be someone else, someone you don't expect, but someone already described in the book. I had no idea who it could be, and I was half-hoping it was in fact the prime suspect, showing that the author had the nerve to go against the grain and simply tell us who did it, and it turns out that's who did it.

You'll have to read it yourself to find out. Maybe good old Freddy did it, and maybe he didn't. Maybe it was suspect number two, Salim, and maybe it wasn't. It couldn't have been daughter Ruby. Could it? No way. Could the girlfriend have done it? Nah. Freddy, we're back to Freddy. But could Richard Price really buck the system that much and have our prime suspect actually guilty?

This book gives us a good lesson in personality types. I recommend the psychology books by Don Riso. The title character, Ray the samaritan, is a Type Two in Riso's personality type system, the helper, the giver, the instant friend, the easy touch. In the most famous personality type system, astrology, I suppose our samaritan is a Pisces, sympathetic and drawn to that world of illusion that can be reached through drugs.

Rating:
Summary: Richard Price has undoubtedly written a first-rate mystery
Review: There are writers --- and then there are writers. We all have our favorites. There are times when you slap yet another metal sticky note onto your crowded psyche as a reminder to pick up a copy of something you read about in the book section of the newspaper --- and then there are those other times. You're headed down the freeway listening to an NPR program when you learn that a certain writer has a new book out. You very calmly but deliberately cut the wheel hard to the left with one hand, yank the emergency brake lever with the other and execute a perfect bootlegger turn across the grassy median in order to take the shortest route to the nearest bookstore. Once you're home with your new prize, you read with such intensity that, hours after you've turned the last page, your eyes still can't properly focus on anything more than a foot away from your face.

I don't know who that writer is for you, but for me it's Richard Price. When I heard that the author of CLOCKERS and FREEDOMLAND (and the screenwriter behind a very respectable selection of screenplays, including THE COLOR OF MONEY and MAD DOG AND GLORY) had a new book out, I knew that I'd be putting in my time as a book zombie. No problem. Like CLOCKERS and FREEDOMLAND, SAMARITAN is set in the city of Dempsey, New Jersey, a kind of East Coast every-town --- run down, ragged and carrying the post-industrial scars that are all that remain after the good times have gone elsewhere. And as with those two previous novels, the various threads of the story at the heart of SAMARITAN converge in the grimy buildings and littered playgrounds of the Hopewell housing project. The multifaceted and richly detailed story centers on two characters whose common history begins in the Hopewell projects.

Ray Mitchell, local-boy-made-good, has returned to Dempsey after a successful stint as a television writer --- a job he landed only after kicking a cocaine habit that cost him his marriage and left him estranged from his thirteen year-old daughter, who now lives with her mother in Manhattan, the skyline of which is visible from the balcony of Ray's apartment in the Dempsey suburbs. Ray's return to Dempsey is part of an effort to re-establish a relationship with his daughter, an effort that includes plans to give something back to the neighborhood of his youth.

Nerese Ammons, on the other hand, never left Dempsey. In her job as a police detective, she is never far from Hopewell and the poverty, drug addiction and violence that marred her own childhood and left her a single mother. She stoically managed the responsibilities of raising a teenaged son and accepted with willingness and a touch of philosophy the additional burden of caring for members of an extended family inherited from her absent, unlamented husband.

When Ray is found brutally beaten and barely alive in his apartment, Nerese, weeks away from retirement and escape to a new life in Florida, takes the case, her interest fueled by the sliver of preadolescent history she shares with Ray. But her investigation is hampered by Ray's refusal to name his assailant. So there's a mystery here to be sure and a darn good one. But there is so much depth and detail to SAMARITAN that to label it a mystery is like describing the Sistine Chapel as a building with a nice ceiling.

At its core, SAMARITAN is an examination of the awesome responsibility inherent in the role of the parent. It is about how, in dealing with that responsibility --- successfully or otherwise --- every person acting in that role adds to the collection of stories that will ultimately define who he or she is and who his or her children will become. Ray Mitchell, a man who understands and values stories, knows that his own story needs a bit of nudging to get it back on course to something resembling a happy ending. In this pursuit he volunteers to teach creative writing to a group of students at his old high school, pro bono. He speaks passionately to his students about the value of the stories in their lives and his message resonates with a few. But even as he makes headway with his students, Ray's ability to truly connect with his daughter is hobbled by his desperate need to be liked. And while his daughter is a willing and eager audience for the tales of his youth, Ray, for all his talent and skill, can't penetrate to the truth of his own story.

When Ray learns that an old school acquaintance doesn't have the money to bury her son, a victim of drug abuse, he and his daughter visit the woman in her Hopewell apartment and he presents her with a check, hoping that his daughter has taken notice of his extraordinary generosity. Though heartfelt and genuine, Ray's act of kindness, one of many in the story, is motivated by self-conscious needs so acute that they blind him to the responsibilities that go hand in hand with such generosity. It is this blindness that will leave Ray beaten and bleeding on the floor of his apartment and send Nerese Ammons on the trail of the person who put him in that condition.

SAMARITAN, indeed a first-rate mystery, has something important to say, but it eases its message out drop by drop in doses so carefully controlled that the ultimate impact is at once surprising and obvious. Richard Price has demonstrated once again a profound and often chilling understanding of what is inside our heads and a masterful ability to translate that unimaginable complexity into compact, highly readable prose.

--- Reviewed by Bob Rhubart

Rating:
Summary: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Review: This gritty, beautifully-written novel tells the tale of Ray, a soft touch whose generosity masks an urgent need to overcome his personal demons. An ex-teacher and ex-screenwriter, tormented by guilt over having let down his own family, he is a do-gooder who lets himself be talked into spending his dwindling resources on the needs (sometimes authentic and sometimes crackpot) of various residents of the inner-city housing project where he grew up, as well as those of a former student.
The book is written in two parallel narrative threads, one focusing on the events leading up to a brutal assault on Ray, and the other focusing on the post-assault investigation of the crime by an old friend who also grew up the housing project. The characters are not drawn in black and white (although interracial tensions are a constant undercurrent), but in finely evoked shades of gray.
The lesson (probably never to be learned by Ray) is that building up one's own self-esteem by overhelping those in need can lead to unintended consequences far beyond the immediate situation.
A wonderful, moving book, peopled with characters you will never forget.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully compelling read
Review: This if my first Richard Price book, and after finishing it this morning, I can tell you it won't be my last. Smart, urbane, honest, rich are all adjective thrown around to describe writing, but in this case, those words have weight and truth, as does every single page in Samaritan.

"Samaritan" tells the tale of Ray, mysteriously wounded in an attack in his apartment by an assailant he's not willing to identify. Enter old childhood friend Nerese, a soon-to retire detective and old friend of Ray's, who gets roped into but quickly compelled to solve this brutal attack. Price spills out a bevy of complicated, interesting characters that seemingly haave hard lives and could have done the crime. Without Ray's help, it falls on Nerese's shoulders to turn on her detecting skills, which are finely honed if underused. In fact, it is probably Nerese's character that I found most interesting, loving her stamina, goal orientated thinking, and sheer determination.

Price's writing strength is in his brevity of words saying so much. His sentences contain punches that more than once caused me to reread them to get the effect again. Price masters the art of saying much by saying it originally and saying little. It is truly inspirational writing.

My only complaint about the book is in some of the characters "stories" that they tell. This is a novel about stories, everyone has a story to tell, from Ray's return to the projects where he grew up, to Nerese trying to give her son a real life, to Ruby, Ray's wrought teenage daughter. However some of these stories wander on for pages and pages, and at least one of them seemed unimportant to the plot. They became distracting towards the end of the story as you just wanted to wrap it up. Small complaint, but valid.

Don't miss this book. Put it on your "must read" list, meet Price's characters, and remember them for a lifetime.

Rating:
Summary: "Interesting and Well-Written"
Review: This is the first novel Mr. Price has written in a few years and in my opinion the wait was worth it. I like the characters, the dialogue, and, the plot I found very compelling in this whodunit. An interesting combination.

John Savoy
Savoy International
Motion Pictures Inc.

Rating:
Summary: Samaritan
Review: This was a very enjoyable book. It was a good mystery but the psychological and sociological aspects were what made it well above the quality of the average thriller. The characters stay with you long after the last page. I intend to recommend this one to friends.