A Day Late And A Dollar Short

Abstract

"HAS THE ESSENCE OF AMERICA, its very nature," Arthur Miller won? dered in the Sunday New York Times of last February 23, "changed from benign democracy to imperium?" In one of my own recent stories, "Rough God Goes Riding," written in 2000, an officer tells his troops, without a hint of irony, that "We have to help these people, because we're Americans, and they're not." Closer to our purpose here, Walker Percy, in his essay "A Novel about the End of the World," written at the height of the Cold War, asks the question that we'll pursue in this essay: "Is it too much to say that the novelist, unlike the new theologian, is one of the few remaining witnesses to the doctrine of original sin, the imminence of catastrophe in paradise?" If literary journalism more than fiction these days chronicles and memorializes experience, fiction shapes it (that is to say, compresses it) and forces us, at its most stringent, to forego ideology and recognize that the monkey wrench in the works, though sometimes a contraption planted by the alien Other or by a corrupt system, can just as well fall from the toolbox of our own conflicted selves. In Samaritan, Richard Price's sweeping new novel, Ray Mitchell, a man with newfound Holly? wood wealth, returns to the New Jersey projects where he grew up and manages not only to come close to getting himself killed but also to wreck the lives of the people he decides to help.1 Price, who launched his substantial career in his twenties with The Wanderers, a collection of stories that managed to turn urban blight and teenage angst into black comedy, made a writer's fortune in Hollywood with honorable screen? plays like Sea of Love and The Color of Money before returning to fiction with Clockers, Freedomland, and now this one. The underbelly of Ameri? can life that Price chronicles in this rough trilogy is near-naturalistic in its grimy detail but highly structured; in Samaritan, Ray, the compulsive do-gooder and soft touch ("the need in him chugging like a train") who teaches creative writing gratis at his old high school as he also tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter, gets conked into a coma early on. Detective Nerise Ammons, his childhood acquaintance who believes "heart and soul in doing unto others as they do unto me, good or bad, and I make damn sure everybody around me knows it too," takes on the case, and the narrative alternates between her and Ray. As he recovers