Samaritan

Alternating between visiting Mitchell in the hospital, and assembling clues to his past and recent doings in Dempsy, Ammons's determination to crack the case mounts proportionally to her frustration with Mitchell for refusing, in yet another gesture of questionable altruism, to reveal the identity of his attacker.

Samaritan's structure lends it much of its force: its chapters jump back and forth in time, alternating between the weeks before the attack and the weeks after, inexorably closing in on the central event as the red herrings fall by the wayside and the facts cohere, describing a spiraling, inward momentum that drives the reader toward the perhaps guessable, but still perfectly pitched, identity of the attacker. And of course, the writing is superlative: Price's dialogue captures the natural, organic rhythms of inner-city speech ("pure profane smack," to borrow a term from Anthony Swofford) without condescension or caricature, and would like to be described as "crackling" and "gritty" in the vein of Elmore Leonard, but that, given the context, more accurately recalls the sharp, slangy dialogue of Susan Straight.

His characters are effortless, frequent storytellers, and sometimes-humorous, sometimes-poignant (often both) anecdotes about Hopewell's cast of lively denizens bring the projects to life before our eyes. Price's deft handling of interracial tensions is commendable and believable, never lapsing to cliché or to trumped-up moralizing - his characters make startling decisions and hold unexpected beliefs that catch us off guard by being surprising, yet internally consistent, which starkly illuminates how frequently characters of different ethnicities are literarily drawn as stark dichotomies of black and white, thesis and antithesis. Price's characters are human and complex, they live and breathe and strut around on the page, transcending easy archetypes to become real people.

Equally adroit is Price's handling of each character's motivations. While Mitchell becomes somewhat less likeable over the course of the novel, as his gestures of goodwill become more profligate and needy, the central question of whether they stem from some great fount of inner righteousness or from a selfish desire to feel like a good person is never resolved, and regardless of their motivations and unpleasant side-effects, it's inarguably true that his good deeds have some positive and direly needed effects on their recipients' lives. The question of personal responsibility, and the freighted implications of what drives it, is central to Price's novel: Does it matter what Mitchell's motivations are, as long as he's attempting to help? What is Ammons's obligation to the family that has dragged her down all her life, yet simultaneously lent it structure and purpose?

Is Mitchell loving his neighbor as he loves himself, or loving his neighbor so that he can love himself? These questions are never answered, but asked of the reader time and time again through psychologically intricate interpersonal interactions, and imbue the novel with an intellectual resonance that persists long after the central mystery is resolved. Here, the omission of "good" from the title becomes crucial again: it's enough to say (and indeed, it's all that can be said with any certainty) that Mitchell is a Samaritan, one who helps those in need regardless of whether they requested or even desire his help. It's prudent to withhold value judgments, which will be assigned only in the aftermath, when all the chips have fallen where they may.