True grit

DOWNTOWN BEAT Price did research south of Houston Street.

Photograph: John Gransky

Richard Price is one hell of a raconteur. Whether it’s the 1992 drug-dealing opera Clockers or the new Lush Life, a polyphonic murder tale set on the Lower East Side, opening any of his books means getting hooked—you turn the first page on the commute back from work and next thing you know, it’s 4am and you’ve polished off both the novel and an entire bag of Milanos. (No wonder he’s written episodes for The Wire, one of the most addictive—pun not intended—TV series ever aired.) Talking to Price, 58, in his comfy and very lived-in home office near Gramercy Park feels pretty much the same way, minus the cookies: The guy likes telling stories.

The first way Price’s books lure you in is through the particular cadence of their dialogue. He’s often praised for having a great ear, though few of his reviewers (myself included) could vouch firsthand for the authenticity of his cops-and-robbers slang. “If you’re paying attention to glossary—if you’re putting on your pith helmet like Margaret Meade—by the time the book is out, that stuff is going to be like Run-D.M.C.,” he says. “A great ear for dialogue has nothing to do with being a human tape recorder. If you truly wrote down how people speak, it would be like a bad Andy Warhol movie. The thing to good dialogue is the illusion of how people speak. You try to squeeze things together a little bit when nobody’s looking.”

Things do get squeezed—and shots are squeezed off—in Lush Life. A young white hipster named Ike is gunned down in a botched mugging on Eldridge Street, and the book registers the aftershocks of his death. The focus ricochets from the investigating cop, Matty, to the main witness and potential suspect, Eric, and to Tristan, a kid from the local projects. Price’s control of a conversation’s flow is in full display in an elaborate interrogation—one of the writer’s specialties, as fans of Clockers well know—that goes on uninterrupted for 29 pages. “A lot of long dialogue scenes are a little bit like scat singing for me,” Price explains. “It’s like improv: I just know I have to get from A to B, and I’m going to bebop my way over there. I just have confidence in my own bullshit, you know?”

But Price’s self-deprecation only goes so far: His improvisational approach is so gripping because it’s built on documentation and field trips. Asked if he walked around below Houston Street a lot to soak up the atmosphere, Price replies, “There’s walking around and then there’s walking around with somebody who knows more than you do, and all you do is walk in their shadow and keep a conversation going. That’s become my M.O.; it’s a sort of an OCD-type thing.”

Setting the new book in a real-life neighborhood (novels such as Clockers, Freedomland and Samaritan took place in the fictional Jersey town of Dempsy) didn’t simplify matters for Price, now confronting a more personal subject. “Eric obviously was the most autobiographical for me,” he says. “I was just imagining what I would be like if I didn’t luck out.”

Eric and his Losaida friends and neighbors belong to a particular group Price hadn’t really written about so far: the young, white, urban bohemian. The eye he casts on them is both affectionate and resolutely unsentimental—the eulogy for Ike by his narcissistic buddies has got to be one of the cruelest indictments of hipsterdom committed to page. But what gives that scene a larger resonance is its matter-of-fact juxtaposition with snapshots from project life. “At one point, Eric starts thinking about the difference between the kids who did the shooting and the young white kids who are floating around, and what they have in common is self-centeredness,” Price says. “The kids in the projects are focused on what they want and what they need in the moment—there’s no center to their self-centeredness. The other kids have a center because they’ve been loved all their lives. They think they’re grieving but the center of the grieving is ‘me, me, me, me.’ They’re not monsters, they’re babies.”

In Lush Life, the procedural structure allows Price to portray people from vastly different backgrounds—a much wider cast of characters than can be found in most literary fiction. At the same time, he is prompt to undermine some of the expectations linked to genre. “I’m not ever interested in who did it but rather in why they did it,” Price specifies. “I don’t like when the good get rewarded and the bad get punished—that makes it a genre book. I don’t want any rules.”

Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) is out now.

Check out our extended, web exclusive interview with Richard Price