brunobaby

So you know that I'm seriously in awe and totally jealous of Sam Anderson's review of Price's Lush Life in New York Magazine. It's done as a parody of Price's police procedural and it's brilliant:

“What do we like here, gentlemen?”

Sanchez spoke up first. “Pretty much everything, boss. Best writer of dialogue since Plato. Slang you never even heard of. Keep expecting the page to stand up and wander off somewheres, make a pass at your wife, order a bacon
sandwich. I mean—yeah, no, the guy can screenwrite, sure, little and big screen both. But what I didn’t know? What you forget every time ’cause he blows three-four years between books writing shit like Shaft and the talking parts of Michael Jackson videos? Pure literature, baby. The fucking merits. Does this full-on virtuoso Zola spiel, nineteenth-century-style social-realist novelist-as-reporter thing, X-ray of the city: sleeping arrangements of illegal Chinese immigrants, inventory of a teenage girl’s room in the projects, every object in a Lower East Side post-murder sidewalk shrine. Dude could look you up and down for three seconds, tell you everything you got in your pockets—everything you ever had in your pockets, everything your kids got in their pockets. Everything you wish you had in your pockets instead.”

In fact, it was so great that Price responded in the Comments:

thanks for the funny flattering take-off. but i dont hate hipsters i am a hipster. my grandfather was a hipster my kids are hipsters, my kids kids [when they have them] will be hipsters.

So now, every time I go to write dialog, I'll be intimidated not only by the king of American urban fiction, but also by the parody of the king of American urban fiction.