Volume 50, Number 11 · July 3, 2003
You Can't Go Home Again?
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Richard Price's Samaritan is a novel about return. The grown-up child returns to his parents' home; the native lured by the material luxuries of Los Angeles and the TV industry returns to his birthplace, a working-class New Jersey neighborhood which has sunk deeper into poverty and neglect; the prodigal (here, cocaine-addled and self-absorbed) son returns to what he takes for the path of virtue. Return is indeed a form of virtue, since the hero's old neighborhood—in a smallish city called Dempsy of which Price has written previously in Clockers and Freedomland—is the kind that most people are prepared to abandon if they can find their way to more glittering places. To go back becomes for the scriptwriter Ray Mitchell—or, at least, is intended to become—at once a form of atonement and a restoration to a sense of reality.
Review, 3630 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |