It’s been two decades since Richard Price’s Clockers first hit bookshelves (kids, those are the things grown-ups had before tablets to hold their bound volumes of printed paper product). A lot has happened in those 22 years: America got its first black president, the Red Sox broke their 86-year curse, Justin Bieber was born. And yet, to read Clockers in 2014 doesn’t feel much like an exercise in time travel, or historical fiction. For all the emphasis the United States has put on in its wars on Drugs and Poverty, respectively, Clockers might as well have been written last year
Set in a fictional New Jersey town, Clockers follows the ins and outs of a group of housing projects—home to a complex network of drug dealers—as well as the cops and detectives whose business it is to prevent the success of said drug trade. The novel is primarily concerned with Strike, an up-and-coming pusher struggling to balance his financial ambition against his disillusionment with hustling; and Rocco, a homicide detective charged with investigating a murder that may be connected to Strike’s crew. Split between the perspectives of its two main characters, Clockers is immediately reminiscent of the McNulty/Avon dynamic in the first season of The Wire. Which makes sense: author Richard Price was a writer on the show.
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