Book Review

By Derryll White

Price, Richard (1998).  Freedomland.

Richard Price is very skilled at presenting the chaos, frustration and despair of the New Jersey/New York ghetto areas. The reader can smell and feel the sweat and adrenaline of the project crowds gathering around Brenda Martin.

Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard never had back alleys and hell-hole apartments any grubbier or more desolate than what Price creates in ‘Freedomland.’ He gives the reader the madness and heat of young and old without hope, caged in poverty.

The author expends as much thoughtful energy and care on the characters as he does on the setting.  Lorenzo Council is “Big Daddy,” a child in every respect of the projects he polices. Jesse Haus, reporter for the Dempsey Register, is consumed by the story of Brenda Martin. It all swirls around Brenda, presumably car-jacked with her son in the back seat.

The author creates tension and builds it to unbelievable proportions. The reader becomes locked in to lives that are so sad it makes one weep.

This is not a pretty story. It is very honest both in the way we value each other and in the way discard and abuse each other. This is not a tale for the faint of heart but it is more than 700 pages of sustained emotional involvement. Price is enchanted with the breadth of human capability and he wants the reader to experience all facets of it.

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Excerpts from the novel:

BLACK IN AMERICA – “We are sometimes” – the cleric, speaking softly now, smiled forgivingly at the sullen folks below him – “sometimes a frightened people.  And with good reason, good reason.  A young black male growing up in this, this cesspool of a city has a greater chance of meeting a violent death before he reaches his majority than did the average GI overseas in World War II.”

NEW JERSEY – …Hurley Street.  It was an unlikely crime for the location, a potholed cul-de-sac at the bottom of the Armstrong hill, a broad strip of asphalt canyoned between the high-rises climbing to the east and a sloped Conrail retaining wall to the west, ending in a grubby pocket park that straddled the city line with neighboring Gannon.  Hurley was more of a half-assed parking lot for the tenants than a bona fide street.  The combination of murky desolation and a spongy borderline made it a good dope spot and by extension, no place for a violent crime that would only draw police and shut down business.

MOTHER – “What you give your children is who you are.  You make them suffer in any way that involves a choice of action on your part, you make them suffer from any behavior of yours that you could have, mastered, then you’re an obscenity.  You shit in God’s mouth.”  Brenda’s voice was as raw as her words, full of self-loathing.

FAMILY – Sometimes it seemed to him that he spent most of his waking hours trying to hold families together.  Lorenzo regarded a mother and a father together under one roof as a blessing, regarded a mother or a father’s swat to the backside or even to the side of a teenager’s head as commitment, as concern.  Parents, no matter how angry, how strict or repressive, as long as they provided three squares, a cot, and consistent rules to live by, were to be respected, were to be honored, were to be treasured because, without a family in place, without at least some facsimile of a family in place, no kid stood a chance, at least nor in Lorenzo’s neck of the woods.

DEATH – The body lay before them like an offering, a tableau – a death for your contemplation, death arrayed, death in all its inert majesty, in all its terrible absoluteness, death in your face, in your eye, a death to take your breath away – and for a long moment the air, what little there was to begin with, went out of the hall, no one talking, no one walking, the only signs of insistent life being the medic, quietly reaching in and feeling for a pulse in Barry’s throat, and a seemingly sourceless ripple coming through the unresisting crowd as the small mechanic worked his way like a cat through tall grass, toward the lobby door and home.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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