Freedomland - Hardcover

Price, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767900243 ISBN 13: 9780767900249

Publisher: Broadway Books, 1998

Synopsis

The celebrated author of Clockers delivers his most compelling and accomplished novel to date.

A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night.

So begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting?

Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career.

As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story.

At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.

About this title

Review

In Freedomland, Richard Price returns to the gritty terrain he first explored in Clockers. 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.

From the Publisher

"A big, cinemascope thriller, a novel that captures the racial politics and media madness of the Age of O.J., a novel that transforms today's headlines into a forceful, harrowing drama....a terrific read...Price has written his most powerful novel yet."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Praise for Richard Price and his work:

"Price shows that he's got the best equipment a novelist can have--that combination of muscularity, insight, and compassion we might call heart."
--Washington Post Book World

"Price pressure cooks the city down to its dense, searing essentials."
--Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Powerful...harrowing...a drama of quite remarkable complexity."
--the New York Times on Clockers

"Clockers is a great piece of work."
--Tom Wolfe

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0767900243
• ISBN 13: 9780767900249
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560