Samaritan
By Richard Price
Knopf, 377 pages, $25
Early in June 1997, the final month of the school year, teacher Jonathan Levin was found shot to death in his modest Manhattan apartment. In the days that followed, two compelling pieces of information emerged. The idealistic young English instructor at a troubled public high school in the Bronx turned out to be the son of a wealthy corporate executive, Gerald Levin of Time Warner. And it appeared that Jonathan Levin had been killed by a former student.
The slain teacher became an instant symbol of social conscience and commitment. Amid tears, Levin’s pupils told of how he had treated them to Yankees games, bought them clothes, written rap lyrics on the blackboard, shared his home telephone number and address.
But amid the tributes there were some knowing whispers, especially among teachers more experienced than Levin had been. Here was a victim of his own unconditional goodness. Here was a missionary who never learned where to draw the line between profession and private life, between being an adult and being a peer to his charges. Touchingly and foolishly, Levin had opened the door to his own murderer.
The Levin case beats like Poe’s telltale heart beneath the floorboards of Richard Price’s wrenching new novel, “Samaritan.” Without dictating Price’s fiction, reality inspires his imagination, provoking a finely detailed and immensely readable inquiry into what might be called the double nature of benevolence. Levin died for his naivete; the protagonist of “Samaritan,” Ray Mitchell, almost dies for something more complicated, a mixture of genuine compassion and “selfish selflessness,” in Price’s phrase.
Like its two extraordinary predecessors, the novels “Clockers” and “Freedomland,” “Samaritan” takes place among the housing projects, police stations and grimy groceries of Dempsy, N.J., a fictive amalgam of Jersey City and Price’s native Bronx. And Ray Mitchell bears no small resemblance to Price. Both author and character grew up as part of the last generation of poor whites to populate big-city projects. Mitchell starts out as a teacher in an inner-city school, destroys that career with insubordination and a cocaine habit, and through a chain of circumstance winds up on the writing team for a TV show about a tough urban high school.
“Samaritan” opens with Mitchell returning to Dempsy, flush with his Hollywood earnings, and yearning “to do something–something clear-eyed and right and good, something selfless yet to the heart of him.” That desire most immediately takes the form of volunteering to teach a creative-writing class at a local high school. It also draws Mitchell into helping a black family he barely knows pay for a relative’s funeral, and starting an affair with the adult daughter in that family, even as her estranged husband is about to get out of jail.
” ‘Ray,’ ” one character muses. ” ‘He always says “I just want to make a dent.” But what he really wants to do is make a splash. There’s a big difference.’ “
When Mitchell is found unconscious and bloody on the floor of his apartment, his skull nearly cracked open, the job of finding his assailant falls to Nerese Ammons, a detective who coincidentally was a childhood acquaintance. Mitchell refuses to identify his attacker. At that point, “Samaritan” becomes a kind of police procedural, a search for a culprit, as were “Clockers” and “Freedomland.”
But where a typical crime novel would traffic in surprises and twists–think of it as the mirror image of farce–Price has always eschewed the formula. The wisdom and impact of his recent books derive from his insight into just how unspectacular crime can be. The perpetrators in Price’s fiction act less out of passion or greed than drudgery and shattered hope.
At the outset of “Clockers,” for instance, a young husband working two jobs turns himself in to the police for having shot a drug gangster. The rest of the book follows the detective futilely, and mistakenly, trying to pin the crime on the confessor’s younger brother, a street-level cocaine dealer. In “Freedomland,” a work catalyzed by the Susan Smith case, a white police officer’s sister claims that her young son was abducted and killed by a black carjacker, a charge that nearly convulses Dempsy in riots. Instead, as Price excruciatingly describes she had accidentally killed the child herself by overdosing him with cold medicine so he would sleep through her assignations with a boyfriend.
For much of “Samaritan,” Ammons draws her net around the cuckolded husband of Mitchell’s girlfriend, a mid-level drug dealer with some history of violence. What that net catches, however, is the girlfriend’s teenage son, whom Ray had introduced to adventure books and baseball cards, and with whom Ray had played catch. For Ray, those gestures meant to prove his worthiness to his lover, Danielle. To the boy, Nelson, they came as fleeting, titillating tastes of fatherly affection. And that affection is jerked to an unbearable halt when his real father is released from jail, and Ray and Danielle break off their affair.
” ‘He taught me catch,’ Nelson wailed from the couch,” Price writes of the boy’s confession. ” ‘He bought me books, he showed me stuff, he told me stuff and then he didn’t want to see me anymore. What did I do?’ Nelson began rocking, his eyes blistered with grief.”
Several pages later, Ammons tells Mitchell:
” ‘What did you think, that kid would just stop thinking about you after he went home like you stopped thinking about him? You reach out in any way to a child like that, you cannot be oblivious to what you might be unleashing.
” ‘I mean, you’re a good guy, Ray, you have good intentions and all, but you need too much to be liked and that’s a bad weakness to have. It makes you reckless. And it makes you dangerous.’ “
On the narrative journey from mystery to resolution, Price demonstrates his usual gifts for dialogue, detail and empathetic portraiture. He understands how a certifiably middle-class black like Ammons can have an alcoholic mother, a brother with AIDS and a nephew accused of murder. The most vivid character in the novel may be an obese and oracular former heroin addict known as White Tom, who tries to steer substance-abusing police officers into recovery programs.
“Despite the last ten years of sobriety,” Price writes in a typically well-observed passage, “White Tom retained many of his junk-head proclivities: the sweet tooth for candy bars, glazed doughnuts, sodas, sugar-laden coffee. . . . He couldn’t pass a pay phone without flicking the coin return, still stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of salvageable debris–rubber, copper, iron, aluminum–all of it cash on the hoof at a scrap yard. He assembled the day’s paper out of cast-off sections in diners and coffee shops, and he still walked around with a set of works, although these days they were for shooting insulin, not scag.”
When a novelist stays that close to the ground, there is no confusing illusion with actuality. Ray Mitchell as a martyr would be a palliative for a reader, a way of complimenting our enlightened, affluent selves. Ray Mitchell, captive of “the ferocity of his yearnings,” with their compound of sacrifice and narcissism, offers no such easy comfort.
