Almost the best novel I have read since the last Richard Price is “Lush Life,” which I just barreled through in two middle-of-the-nights when dread was lurking right outside the bedroom door. Nobody is as cinematic in drawing characters with dialogue alone. It helped that I was such an aficionada of Schiller’s (and its uneasy neighborhood) way back when, but even a reader who could not conjure the place from memory would be transported by the descriptions of its subterranean side, and of the quotidian realities of running a restaurant in a city where waiter is so rarely a valued profession. Mostly, though, the book made the frenzy over the closing of Florent seem even more ridiculously hysterical. All that weeping and gnashing and rending of garments when the city is changing everywhere in every way by the second, constantly and relentlessly. Not to throw out a spoiler or anything, but I hear the Borgata is looking for a transvestites’ diner. . . .