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Freedomland
by Richard Price
- Synopsis
- 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.
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