The crime quotient

Lead review

Writing as Harry Brandt, Richard Price follows characters, many of them New York detectives, haunted by, and hunting for, unpunished criminals. Michiko Kakutani writes...

The Whites, the title of Richard Price’s riveting new novel, is a reference to the great white whale in Moby-Dick — a book that seems to be a kind of touchstone for the author (writing here under the pen name Harry Brandt), having popped up, at least glancingly, in such earlier novels as Clockers and Freedomland. This time, the parallels to Melville’s classic are beyond obvious: All of the story’s main characters are haunted by something terrible that happened in the past, and all are obsessed with hunting down their nemeses.

These characters are all cops or former cops (who, “starting out in the late ‘90s, had christened themselves the “Wild Geese“), and as Price has demonstrated in his earlier novels and episodes of the HBO show The Wire, he not only has a visceral ability to convey the gritty, day-to-day realities of their jobs, but also a knack for using their detective work the way John le Carré has used spy stories and tradecraft, as a framework on which to build complex investigations into the human soul.

The story architecture here is based on these characters’ Ahab-like quests to settle scores with their personal Whites — “those who had committed criminal obscenities on their watch and then walked away untouched by justice”: the sexual predator who bludgeoned to death a 12-year-old; the ringleader of a white street gang who, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, chased a Pakistani boy into an oncoming car; the man who murdered a college-bound basketball player for making him look bad in a pickup game; a small-time felon who fatally stabbed a ninth-grader who had talked to his girlfriend at school.

This premise may sound a little strained, but Brandt immerses us so fully in his characters’ lives that the larger contrivances almost completely fall away. No one has a better ear for street language than he (er, Richard Price) does, and no one these days writes with more kinetic energy or more hard-boiled verve.

His high-impact prose is the perfect tool for excavating the grisly horrors of urban life: a panic-stricken boy, “running blindly across the four-lane northbound parkway,” struck “by a muscle car doing 65, the sound of the impact” loud enough “to set off car alarms for blocks around.” And his ability to map his characters’ inner lives — all the dreams and memories and wounds that make them tick — results in people who become as vivid to us as real-life relatives or friends.

Billy Graves, the hero of The Whites, is the head of a team of detectives in charge of covering “all of felony-weight Manhattan from Washington Heights to Wall Street between 1 am and 8 am”; his “White” is one Curtis Taft — the coldblooded killer of a woman, her daughter and her niece — whose whereabouts Billy has recently tracked down.

Though there is a dark episode in his past involving the accidental and near-fatal shooting of a 10-year-old Hispanic boy in the Bronx many years ago, Billy is a good-hearted, weary-souled fellow with what he thinks of as a “flatline personality.” It is Brandt’s achievement that he takes Billy’s “bland stolidness” and gives us a character as immensely real and sympathetic as le Carré’s George Smiley — that is, if Smiley were a New York cop.

Brandt conveys the daily grind of Billy’s life, one trouble stacking upon the next like piled firewood — including worries about his tempestuous wife, Carmen; his aging father’s dementia; his two beloved sons’ safety — and the exhausting mix of adrenaline and doggedness that his job demands. He captures the odd battlefield rhythms of being a detective: the nights when it was “nothing but softballs” and the nights when it’s coming in hot and heavy, one horrifying crime after the next, one devastated family after another.

To build further tension, Brandt deals out one more terrible card to poor Billy: a stalker nearly as sadistic and relentless as Chigurh, the chilling villain in Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, who has been watching Billy’s home and following members of his family.

The suspense has little to do with the identity of this stalker — we’re clued in, early on, to who he is — but with whether he will succeed in exploding Billy’s family, and the complicated and long-ago reasons behind his own Ahab-like quest for vengeance.

Brandt does not turn this man into a factory-issue bad guy or a symbol of irredeemable evil, but rather seeks to humanise him, to dramatise the terrible losses that fuel his anger and the internal conflicts he feels, as he’s pulled between his need to avenge the terrible wrongs done to his family, and his love for his young daughter, whom he knows he will lose if he completely embraces the dark side.

The rest of the characters in The Whites are delineated with similar emotional gradations. Brandt chronicles the fraternal bonds among Billy and the surviving members of the Wild Geese that have endured despite ups-and-downs over some two decades, even as most of them have moved on to new lives.

Redman Brown, having been shot through the hips in a hostage situation, now runs his father’s funeral parlour in Harlem; Jimmy Whelan has become an itinerant building super, living year to year “in some of the finer basement apartments of the city”; Yasmeen Assaf-Doyle quit the force to take a security job at a university in Lower Manhattan; and Billy’s former partner, big John Pavlicek, having played “the exit game” to perfection, made a bundle buying former crack squats, rehabbing them and flipping them in New York’s booming real estate market.

The Whites doesn’t give the reader the keen sense of changing class and race lines that Price’s 2008 novel, Lush Life, did, but its sure sense of the rhythms of New York — the “general malice” out there that often kept Billy busy all night and the occasional acts of grace and kindness that help redeem the wearying grind — lend the Melvillian travails of its characters a local name and habitation. Despite its occasional lumps, this novel is, at once, a gripping police procedural and an affecting study in character and fate.