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America's Urban Nightmare
| Article
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20539 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
3,549 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
As if to illustrate the maxim that it's an ill wind that blows nobody good, the Loss Angeles riots returned the nation's focus, for a time at least, to the pathologies of America's inner cities. Incidentally, they provided the near-perfect backdrop for Richard Price's grimly realistic novel of adolescent drug dealers and the cops who engage in a constant and perhaps futile battle against them. Anyone living in or near most of our large cities has been aware for years of the tide of drug-engendered my hem and murder on the streets, but in the last two months the debate over solutions to our urban ills has renewed the familiar calls for something to be done to rescue those trapped in the nation's inner cities.
Not since the late sixties have we seen such a focus on the turmoil, the despair, and the heartbreak of those who must every day struggle for some modicum of basic safety and decency in an increasingly savage landscape. Politicians and social planners are not short of proposed solutions or targets to blame for the abysmal conditions.
By taking us into these harsh streets, Clockers gets beneath the cloud of moralistic and often self-serving abstractions surrounding the topic, letting us experience for ourselves the intense complexity and bitter ironies of the fight for what amounts to the soul of future generations. An exciting novel, Clockers does not hand us ready-made answers; instead, it makes us feel the realities any genuine solutions must encounter.
Entangled opponents
Price anchors the novel around the clash between Strike, a black drug dealer in the projects of Dempsy, a fictitious New Jersey city, and Rocco Klein, a cop determined to nail Strike for a murder to which Strike's straight-arrow brother, Victor, unconvincingly confesses. Through these characters we see the tangled, violent action of this deadly world and share the emotions propelling them into a desperate and muddled conflict. This is not a tale of good cop versus evil drug dealer or its politically correct reversal; rather, we have two antagonists impelled toward a clash by the turbulent and unpredictable forces loose in the streets.
For nine months, Strike, nineteen, has been running a string of round-the-clock teenage dope dealers (the "clockers" of the title) from the playground benches in the Dempsy housing project that is the only world he knows. Strike (or Ronald Dunham to his teachers and other authorities) is, we are given to understand, a cut
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