Fishy In New Jersey?

By John Skow

As he did with Clockers, his 1992 novel about the drug trade in a worn-down wasteland of urban New Jersey, Richard Price creates in his new novel, Freedomland (Broadway Books; 546 pages; $25), a thriller in which plot grows inevitably from place, and place seems utterly real. The most powerful impression a reader feels in these two novels is the sense, in a scene set in a chaotic emergency room or in the junk-filled scrubland between a black housing project and a shabby white neighborhood, that yes, this is what such a backwater would look like, sound like, smell like. And that this, as events of Price's long, heavy narration grind toward resolution, is how people sheltering in such a place would claw at one another and disintegrate.

The new book lurches into motion when a thin, anguished white woman staggers from Armstrong Houses, a black housing project in Dempsy, N.J., her palms red with lacerations and glittering with fragments of glass. The victim, Brenda Martin, is stunned and nearly speechless, but Lorenzo Council, a sympathetic black detective whose position in Armstrong seems to be part mayor, part padre, gets her to tell her story. She was carjacked by a black man, she says. Would she like to talk with a woman detective, Council asks, meaning, was she raped? No, something worse: her four-year-old son Cody was asleep on the car's backseat. Jesse Haus, a white woman reporter for a local daily, picks up the story on her police scanner. To her, as to the detective, it seems fishy. What was Brenda doing at Armstrong Houses? Buying drugs? But she sticks to her story.

By now a regiment of cops has barricaded Armstrong Houses. A young male suspect, almost certainly no carjacker, is hauled off in a patrol car. Outraged black pastors organize a march into white territory. Hawkers sell T shirts with the still missing Cody Martin's picture. A chillingly efficient mother's group equipped with a corpse-sniffing dog searches for the boy. Jesse follows. Bigfeet from the national press and TV mill around. Jesse knows more than they do, but not much more. Detective Council knows more than Jesse, but only a little more. Brenda's boss, a black woman who runs a biracial day-care center, says that Brenda is a good, stable, caring worker. But something is wrong, still, with the carjacking story.

Something is wrong with Dempsy, N.J., of course. As a moral to Price's story, this would be pompous. But the author doesn't offer a moral, simply an accurate portrayal of a society all of whose visible elements--cops, press, E.R. medics, pastors, mothers' groups, gawkers and stone throwers--take their energy from pain. A reliable energy source, the reader reflects; bloody hands make the world go 'round.

--By John Skow