Street savvy

When Richard Price finally got around to writing the novel about the Lower East Side that he'd been itching to do for 25 years, he realized that his teenage daughters knew more about the neighborhood than he did.

"They knew where the best clubs were, the best hole-in-the-wall clothing shops, and where the Knitting Factory is," says Price, who will read Tuesday from his new novel, Lush Life - a capacious crime story and character study of cultures colliding in a gentrifying New York neighborhood - at the Free Library on Vine Street.

"But they didn't know anything about the immigrant experience," says the Bronx-born Price, who also wrote Clockers and Freedomland, by phone from Louisville, Ky.

Price's gritty, urban storytelling flair has won him critical acclaim since his novel The Wanderers was published in 1974, when he was 24. It has also earned him a career as a screenwriter (The Color of Money, Sea of Love) as well as a gig writing for HBO's sublime cop show, The Wire.

His interest in writing about the Lower East Side grew out of the knowledge that his own clan "first hopped off the boat and slithered" there a hundred years ago. "That's where the family melodrama starts." (Even so, he has never undertaken an investigation of his Russian-Polish Austro-Hungarian ancestry. "Their name was either Schminsky, Pinsky or Yinsky," he says. "Damned if I know.")

He'd planned to write a historical novel about "the Jacob Riis era," the turn-of-the-20th-century period captured by the muckraking photographer, when the Lower East Side had the highest population density in the world. But Price thought, "How am I going to make it better than [Henry Roth's] Call It Sleep?" He wasn't, he figured. So he set Lush Life, which takes its name from the Billy Strayhorn ballad, in the present, and did what he always does: his homework.

The appeal of the nouveau Lower East Side was the way parallel universes exist alongside one another, chichi boutiques and dead-end housing projects, trendy restaurants and tenements overpopulated with undocumented Chinese immigrants.

"There's the housing-project kids, and the Midwestern white kids with M.F.A.'s, the Chinese, the Spanish, the Dominicans and the Orthodox Jews. There's like six separate worlds. Everybody's occupying the same physical space, oblivious to the other's existence," says Price, whose Lush Life pivots on a crime.

"Two kids decide to jack three yuppies," one of whom "has had a lot to drink and says the wrong thing, and the trigger gets pulled," Price says. "Which gives you the media's favorite kind of victim - an outsider who comes to New York with stars in his eyes, and meets a tragic death on the gritty streets."

The novel dramatizes issues of race and real estate though characters such as Eric Cash, a 35-year-old failed writer and maitre d' - a semi-autobiographical version of Price, had this author job not worked out quite so well; Matty Clark, a hardworking cop who's made a hash of his personal life; Yolanda Bello, Clark's smart-mouthed, empathetic partner; and Tristan Acevedo, a would-be hip-hop poet too soft for the streets.

The page-turner is shaped like a police procedural, but there's next to no mystery. When he's called a crime writer, "I hate it," says Price, who is 58 and married to abstract painter Judith Hudson. "If I could tell you on the cover of the book who did it, I would."

But crime "imposes order, if you want to write about abundant chaos," Price says. "Somebody said a crime is a lazy man's way though a plot, and it's true. It can tell you about the intersections of society if you have a very complex landscape."

Price starts without a story, then sets out to learn what he needs to know. With Clockers, in 1992, later made into a movie by Spike Lee, Price wanted to write "about crack and the drug economy, and the way police were occupying territory in the inner city. And after about six months of hanging out, the story just came out."

He doesn't call what he does "research." "I'm not Margaret Mead," he said. "I'm not an anthropologist. I just want to see what I see and absorb it. It's osmosis. I don't know what I'm looking for. And then in the middle of the night, I'll wake up and say . . . 'Did that guy really say that?' I'll have this retroactive epiphany." For Lush Life, he had restaurant managers teach him how to steal from the waiters' tip pool, and spent time with Chinese community associations. Mostly, though, he hung with police.

"Looking at a neighborhood, it's like the ocean from the shore," he said. "All you see is the surface of the water, and the sunlight bouncing off it. But you go with cops, and it's like somebody gave you a snorkel and a mask, and you see the reef underneath."

Price has been widely praised for his dialogue. "Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced," is how Gone Baby Gone novelist (and fellow Wire scribe) Dennis Lehane put it. (Price: "I think he must have lost his mind.")

Capturing the way people talk comes easily to him. "Some people are natural mimics. I could always do the teacher better than anybody else. When I was playing with my soldiers, I always had them talking to each other."

Good dialogue, however, and realistic dialogue are two different things. "Realistic dialogue is interminable and goes nowhere," he says. "Good dialogue is about heightened reality, nudging it into a form that doesn't really exist in the way people talk."

Descriptive prose is another story. "If I have to write the King's English, two or three descriptive paragraphs in a row, I have a nervous breakdown."

Price was reluctant to write for The Wire. He shared a publisher with the show's creator, David Simon. His editor introduced them. "He brought him over to my house; it was like a playdate. It was the night of the [1992] Rodney King verdict. They were rioting in Jersey City, so we went over there to watch. I'm not sure of the chain of events, but we wound up driving a police car with no cop in it."

Simon told Price that The Wire was inspired by Clockers, but Price says that unlike the series, "There was not a lot of verticality to my book. I kept it right at street level. But David and his partner Ed Burns, they took it all the way [up] to the state legislature. They took it to places I didn't know anything about."

When Simon and Wire producer George Pelecanos (one of Price's favorite novelists, along with Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, Denis Johnson and Lehane) asked him to pitch in, he felt intimidated, but had to get in on it.

"It was too good," he says, even if the show's writers had limited freedom. "It's not like you can kill Omar [the stickup artist], or give him a girlfriend." Price did write himself a cameo in season two as a prison English instructor who teaches The Great Gatsby.

He doesn't know what his next novel will be, but he's got projects. He's writing a movie adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's novel Child 44, a thriller set in the Soviet Union in 1953, with Ridley Scott directing. He's turning Lush Life into a movie with producer Scott Rudin. And FX wants him to develop a series pilot.

"I'm thinking about doing something about the Lower East Side," he says, with an audible smirk.

As a novelist whose stock in trade is to bring the streets alive on the page, Price relishes getting out of his own head and working with other people.

"With screenwriting, the inventiveness is yours, and you can apply it to something that somebody else wants," he said. "And after spending four years in isolation working on [Lush Life] I'll do anything to not be alone and have to write. Though the only thing worse than writing is not writing."

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