Samaritan by Richard Price

From the Publisher

Ray Mitchell, a former TV writer who has left Hollywood under a cloud, returns to urban Dempsy, New Jersey, hoping to make a difference in the lives of his struggling neighbors. Instead, his very public and emotionally suspect generosity gets him beaten nearly to death. Ray refuses to name his assailant, which makes him intensely interesting to Detective Nerese Ammons, a friend from childhood, who now sets out to unlock the secret of his reticence. Set against the intensely realized backdrop of urban America, the cat and mouse game that unfolds is both morally complex and utterly gripping.

The New Yorker

For more than two decades, in gaunt, endlessly alert prose, Price has embraced areas of the city, which have most novelists rolling up their car windows. Here Ray Mitchell, a New Jersey schoolteacher who has quit his job writing for a schmaltzy TV show and now tries to sell ghetto kids on the charms of creative writing, answers his door and gets his skull bashed in. Ray -- whether out of fear or shame -- refuses to say a word about what has happened to him, but, digging in his past, the investigating cop finds plenty to give her pause: a coke habit, a neglected daughter, and a recent affair with a drug dealer's wife. This is a crime in which the victim is the real mystery. Giving new meaning to the term "inner city," Price yields up not just the familiar, blanched moonscape of urban blight but the inner lives and jackhammering hearts of those who pace and patrol it.

Book Magazine

Tweetie, a ten-year-old black girl, is hit with a bat in the housing project where she lives; Ray Mitchell, a young white neighbor, stanches the blood and offers solace. Decades later, Tweetie has become Detective Nerese Adams and is tackling the last case of her tough career: investigating the beating of the same Ray Mitchell, who had returned from a TV-writing stint in Los Angeles to teach at an inner-city high school. Thus begins another of Price's first-rate urban morality plays—a compassionate, politically savvy whodunit that reads like Dostoevsky circa 2003. The author of numerous street-smart epics, including Freedomland, Clockers, Blood Brothers and The Wanderers, Price is renowned for in-your-face fiction: violent, fast paced yet philosophically complex. The screenwriter of such films as Sea of Love and The Color of Money, he's also demonstrated a flair for believable dialogue and visual detail. Whether celebrating black culture or the struggle of the white working class—his signature themes—he proves himself to be one of our best chroniclers of big-city experience.

Publishers Weekly

After a stint writing for a popular television show, Ray Mitchell has returned to his old New Jersey neighborhood to teach at his alma mater. Rethinking his life and trying to reconnect with his teenaged daughter, he soon suffers a terrible assault: he's nearly killed by a vicious blow to the head in his own apartment. He knows who did it, but is keeping mum. An old neighbor from the projects, Nerese Ammons, is the ready-to-retire detective assigned to Mitchell's case. She slowly tries to tease out of Mitchell any clues she can, learning about his past as well as about the relationships he has developed since his return. She's especially interested in Mitchell's battle with drug addiction and his current affair with the wife of a recently released convict. Boatman superbly recites this tale. He uses subtle changes in his tone and delivery to identify each character. Though his voice remains calm throughout the story, he maintains a palpable level of intensity that will keep listeners locked in to the details of Mitchell's tumultuous life. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Dec. 2, 2002). (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. It is a harsh lesson that Ray Mitchell learns, much to his regret. A successful white writer for television, he has come back to the predominately black New Jersey housing projects where he grew up. While trying to reconnect with his alienated teenage daughter, Ray volunteers to teach a writing class at his old high school. When he is found brutally beaten, his head crushed, Detective Nerese Ammons decides to find the culprit as a return favor to Ray; they are old acquaintances from the neighborhood, and Ray once helped her out when they were children. But Ray's refusal to identify his attacker doesn't make her job easy. Price's seventh novel returns to the gritty, decaying urban world of Clockers and Freedomland; once again, his characters are fully fleshed-out human beings, his dialog sharp and true. And Price's take on the nature of generosity (is the giving for the benefit of the receiver or the giver?) is a fascinating one. Like Nerese, however, readers will become impatient with Ray's "selfish selflessness"; the guy is basically a jerk. A dark, depressing novel for larger collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/02.]-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The mastery of urban melodrama that Price demonstrated in literate blockbusters like Clockers (1992), and Freedomland (1998) keeps growing and deepening-as evidenced in his seventh novel. It's the story of a neighborhood and of conflicting ways of life, set in Price's fictional Dempsy, New Jersey, not far from New York City. And its central figures are two 40-something former neighborhood acquaintances: white TV scriptwriter Ray Mitchell, who has returned from La-La-Land newly wealthy, to teach a writing course at his old high school-and, just possibly, reconnect with his teenaged daughter Ruby; and black police detective Nerese Ammons, whose planned early retirement is delayed when she learns that Ray has been savagely beaten by an assailant whom he refuses to identify. A virtuoso alternation of advancing action with detailed flashbacks shows how Nerese's investigation into this mystery raises troublesome ghosts from the past, while also introducing a boldly drawn gallery of involved and potentially guilty characters. The prime suspects appear to be Danielle Martinez, the wife of a jailed drug dealer, with whom Ray has a brief, intense affair; the murderous Freddy Martinez himself; and Coley Rodgers (a.k.a. Salim El-Amin), a luckless denizen of Dempsy's mean streets who takes mercenary advantage of liberal, big-hearted Ray's impulses to be a good "Samaritan" to those less fortunate than he. That latter dynamic is analyzed with a ferocious admixture of bleak wit and sorrowful compassion, and the story positively vibrates with Price's trademark virtues of pinpoint observation (e.g., Nerese notices a TV set "so recently purchased that a few minute shreds of static-charged packing foam stillclung to the gunmetal-gray-frame") and punchy dialogue (a onetime repeat offender wryly boasts, "I don't just have a record, my man, I have a fucking album"). And the killer climax and ironic dénouement couldn't be improved upon. Magnificent stuff. If Elmore Leonard broke out of genre and were 30 years younger, he'd be Richard Price. First printing of 150,000; author tour

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Reading Group Guide

1. The novel begins as Ray tells his daughter Ruby a story from his boyhood in the Hopewell Houses. What is the significance of such stories for Ray? How good a storyteller is he? What is the effect of framing the plot within the story of Tweetie’s injury and his attempt to help her?

2. Chapter 5 gives an account of the information Bobby Sugar has gathered on Ray, including credit card charges and bank withdrawals, medical history, employment, address changes, etc. What does this chapter tell us about the way police detectives shape their view of a person and his or her possible motivations? How is that process similar to, or different from, the way a novelist creates a character?

3. Compare the book’s epigraph from Matthew 6:1–3 to the scene in which Ray, with Ruby present, gives Carla a check for the full amount of her son’s funeral [p. 109]. Ray’s ex-wife Claire comments, “Ray likes to save people, you know, sweep them off their feet with his generosity. It’s a cheap high if you’ve got the money, but basically it’s all about him” [p. 125]. How serious is this flaw in Ray’s character, and why does Price make Ray’s desire to help the novel’s central theme?

4. What is the effect of the novel’s structure—with chapters moving back and forth in time—on your reading experience? Why might Price have chosen to construct the plot in this way?

5. In one of Nerese’s many moments of insight, she muses about Ray:

“The constant white-black casting made her uncomfortable—no, made her angry; but that anger was tempered by the intuition that thiscompulsion in him wasn’t really about race; that the element of race, the chronic hard times and neediness of poor blacks and Latinos was primarily a convenience here, the schools and housing projects of Dempsy and other places like a stocked pond in which he could act out his selfish selflessness over and over…and that he was so driven by this need, so swept away by it, that he would heedlessly, helplessly risk his life to see it played out each and every time until he finally drew the ace of spades, or swords, and got the obituary that would vindicate him, bring tears to his eyes; key word, ‘beloved,’ if only he could figure out some way to come back from the dead long enough to read it.” [p. 215]

In Nerese’s view, Ray is driven primarily by narcissism, by an obsessive desire to be needed and to be thanked. Is her observation correct? Does this motive outweigh the good that Ray tries to do?

6. How incisive is Price as an analyst of race relations? In his desire to “give back,” is there any way for Ray to be comfortable about race, to enter his old community as an affluent white man offering help? Does Ray recognize that in giving Carla the money for the funeral he humiliates her, winning her resentment rather than her gratitude [pp. 109–110]?

7. Is Nerese the moral and emotional anchor of the novel? Why or why not? Given that she and Ray have come from the same place, how have they handled their lives differently? What are the differences in psychology of these two characters? What motivates them?

8. Discuss the relationship between Ruby and Nelson, two children of nearly the same age who are thrown together by Ray and Danielle’s sexual liaison. Why does Ruby refuse to apologize to Nelson when she hits him with the softball? What is the meaning of the story Ruby shares with Ray’s writing class [pp. 353–54]? Why does Price make children such a crucial part of the story?

9. Is Ray exploiting Danielle, or is she exploiting him in their sexual relationship? What motivates Danielle to involve herself and her son with Ray? She sees herself as an independent and self-motivated woman; Ray sees her as a woman who has chosen to stay in a marriage with a drug dealer [pp. 198–201]. Who is right?

10. Samaritan is a drama of redemption, or self-redemption. Why is shame referred to as one of Ray’s defining characteristics? Does he have good reason to feel ashamed of himself? Why does Ray need to redeem himself? How successful is he in his efforts to do so?

11. Who is the most likely suspect for the crime against Ray—Salim, Freddy Martinez, Danielle? To what degree is suspense—the “whodunit” quality—important in a novel like this?

12. How does the character of Salim come across? Why does Samaritan end with Salim, and a chapter called “Thank You” [pp. 370–77]?

13. Discuss Chapter 32, in which Nerese and Ray tell each other about their future plans. What do we learn about Nerese’s past and the way it shaped her life? What is she trying to tell Ray about adults’ responsibility to children? Does it seem that Nerese will be happier once she retires from the police department?

14. In a blurb for the hardcover Elmore Leonard stated, “I read Richard Price for the cool, spare sound of his writing, his words, the language he has in his bag that fits so exactly in his settings. The characters talk the talk.” Do you agree with his assessment? Find a few passages that exemplify Price’s strengths as a stylist and discuss their qualities with your group.

15. With Samaritan, Richard Price again reveals himself to be committed to writing novels that awaken his readers to raw and painful social problems. Charles Taylor commented:

“It seems to me that in reporting on some of society’s bedrock institutions (in this case, prisons and the police) and on communities that many of us are either cut off from or see solely in terms of social problems (thus robbing the inhabitants of their individuality) Price is doing work that we should expect from our major novelists. . . . Though Samaritan is his bleakest book, you put it down convinced he is trying to find, in the midst of racial and economic divisions, the things that we share. He’s the reporter-novelist as despairing humanist.” [Salon.com]

How powerful is Samaritan’s social vision? Does it have a message or a lesson for its readers? What questions and issues does the novel leave unresolved?

Read an Excerpt

Read a Sample Chapter

Ray - January 4

Entering Paulus Hook High School for only the second time since graduation twenty-five years earlier, Ray approached the security desk, a rickety card table set up beneath a blue-and-gold Christmas/Kwanza/Hanukkah banner, which still hung from the ceiling in the darkly varnished lobby four days into the New Year.

The uniformed guard standing behind the sign-in book was a grandmotherly black woman: short, bespectacled, wearing an odd homemade uniform of fuzzy knit watch cap, gray slacks and a commando sweater, a khaki ribbed pullover with a saddle-shaped leather patch straddling the left shoulder.

"You got a visitor's pass?" she asked Ray as he hunched over the sign-in sheet.

"Me? I'm here to guest-teach a class."

"They give you a teacher's ID?"

"A what?" Then, "No..."

Straightening up, he was struck with a humid waft of boiled hot dogs and some kind of furry bean-based soup that threw him right back into tenth grade. "Today's my first day."

. . .

With all regulation classrooms booked at this hour, Ray had been offered the faculty lounge to conduct his volunteer writers' workshop, but in his anxiety for this thing to come off he had shown up too early, walking in on four real teachers brown-bagging it around a long conference table that centered the room.

Despite his stranger status, not one of them even looked his way, and after standing inside the doorway for an awkward moment, he quietly maneuvered himself behind a large scuffed desk wedged into a corner and just sat there waiting for the period-ending bell.

The teachers, all men, seemed to be working their way through a hit list of rotten apples.

"Rosario?"

"Out."

"Jenkins?"

"Out."

"Fanshaw?"

"Out. I talked with his mother and I think he's out of the house, too."

"Maldonado?"

"Out. I just told him. I swear, that kid does 'Bewildered' better than anybody on two feet. 'Mr. Rosen, what I do? Suspended! Why?' Because you're on your own fuckin' planet, Edgardo..."

"How about Templeton..."

"I'm giving him one last chance."

"Aw, he got to you with that smile, huh?"

"Nah, nah nah, I just said, 'Hey Curtis, there's a new statute on the books-Consorting with Known Morons. I see you with Dukey, Ghost, or any of that crew? I don't care if it's a country mile from school property. You're vaporized.'"

"Vaporized?"

"Don't worry, he understood me loud and clear."

They were either ignoring him or simply letting him be, Ray scanning the walls, taking in the student artwork; mostly crude cut-felt mosaics featuring idyllic tableaus of urban positivism: a black family eating dinner together, multicolored neighbors planting a community garden, big brown kids reading to little brown kids.

When the bell finally rang, the teachers at the table groaned to their feet, as reluctant to go back to the classrooms as any of the students.

Three of them filed out of the lounge without ever acknowledging him, but the last one made a stop at the desk, leaning forward on his knuckles to offer a confidence.

"I would rate ninety-six percent of the kids in this school from OK to great; the other four percent are just stone fucking assholes taking up space and there's nothing we can do about it."

Alone now, Ray took in the disembodied sound track of the students out in the halls, a steady murmurous stream of agitation, punctuated by squawks, bird caws and bellows.

Five minutes went by, the muffled hullabaloo gradually fading away out there, yet he found himself still facing an empty room.

To conceal from himself how awkward and vaguely embarrassed he was beginning to feel, he began fiddling with his cell phone; checking for messages, calling the sports hotline, the 970 weather forecast; played with his datebook; then scribbled down a few introductory notes for his phantom students; coming off busy as hell, yet when the school's principal, Bill or Bob Egan, knocked on the open door of the empty lounge, Ray almost shot to his feet with relief.