Clockers (1992) by Richard Price

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Clocker (1992)

by Richard Price

Jersey City, New Jersey

New Jersey: 13/13

  HUZZAH it is the end of Chapter 3 of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, edited by Susan Straight.  Chapter 3 is called "Empire State and Atlantic Shores," or you might just say NY/NJ. Like the last chapter (New England), Chapter 3 is a culturally and geographically cohesive area. You could make an argument that far upstate New York is more contiguous with New England geographically speaking, but there is no denying that upstate New York is still New York state.   New Jersey, meanwhile, is essentially a suburb of New York City- though Southern New Jersey, with it's urban proximity to Philadelphia, is like the converse of upstate New York: It's part of the state of New Jersey, but there are argument for lumping it with Pennsylvania.  

   The last book in this chapter is Clockers, the 1992 crime verite novel about a crew of cocaine dealers working out of Jersey City, and the cops who stalk them.  Clockers was a hit in its own right, spawned a generally well received 1995 movie version courtesy of Spike Lee AND was the direct inspiration for HBO's The Wire, which Price also wrote for, in 2002.   I'm sure I read Clockers around the time it was first published- I would have been in high school when it was published and I'm sure I read it either then or while I was in college- probably the paperback edition.   Landing at close to 600 pages, Clockers is really two novels interwoven, the novel about the cocaine seller, Ronald 'Strike' Dunham, who favors yoo-hoo to self-medicate his ulcer and the novel about Rocco Klein, a police investigator working for the District Attorney homicide squad.   Their paths intertwine when Strike is tasked by his boss to kill Darryl, his second-in-command, and assume his position.  The murder happens outside the fast food restaurant where Darryl works, and Klein gets involved when Strike's younger, hard-working brother, confesses to the crime and claims self-defense. 

  The confession doesn't sit right with Klein, who spends the rest of the book trying to get the bottom of the murder and what he believes to be a false confession.  Strike embodies the "tortured drug dealer" archetype, though reading Clockers reminded me of the insanity of the economics of inner-city cocaine street level dealing.  As an experienced criminal defense lawyer I can say that the only thing dumber than selling drugs on the actual street is bank robbery.   It's funny because Clockers is chock filled with Strike reflecting on the impossibility of working a "straight" job, and I often think how, personally, working a shitty fast-food job would be WAY better than working as a street-level criminal.

  I'm so glad to be done with NY/NJ.