Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium

From The New York Times, Sunday.

YOU might not know it to look at him, but the novelist Richard Price has over the years picked up what one of his characters might call some cheddar. He has a house in Gramercy Park and a summer place out on the Island; his work has earned him an Edgar award for television writing, an Academy Award nomination and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But Mr. Price, who grew up in the Parkside Projects, has shed neither his Bronx accent nor any of his street-smarts.

He is still wary, even a little jumpy at times. Walking around the Lower East Side, where his new novel, “Lush Life,” (Farrar,Straus,Giraux) is set, he could easily be mistaken for one of the locals. Pale, thin, high-strung, with the baggy eyes of someone who doesn’t get enough sleep, he could even be a guy looking to score a little coke — something Mr. Price admits to doing with regularity back in the ’80s. He walks quickly, jokes a lot without smiling much, and, as readers of his books know, has a pitch-perfect mastery of urban speech in all its varieties. He may be the only middle-aged white man in America who can say “True dat” without sounding ridiculous.

Now 58, Mr. Price published his first book, “The Wanderers,” set in the blue-collar Bronx of his childhood, when he was just 24 and barely out of Cornell — from which he emerged, he has said, even streetier and more Bronx-sounding than when he began — and the M.F.A. program at Columbia, where his models were Hubert Selby and Lenny Bruce.

He has published steadily every since, eventually turning from more or less autobiographical work to books like “Clockers” and “Freedomland,” big, Dickensian novels about the drug trade and life in the projects. He has also written the screenplays for “Clockers,” “The Color of Money” (for which he received the Oscar nomination), “Sea of Love” and “Mad Dog and Glory,” among other movies, and recently he has written some episodes for the HBO series “The Wire,” which won him the Edgar. He’s one of a handful of contemporary novelists to work for Hollywood and emerge more or less unscathed.

Like “Clockers” and “Freedomland,” “Lush Life” is at its core a thriller or a mystery story — about a holdup ending in a murder. “I tend to like crime for a backbone,” Mr. Price said recently. “An investigation will take you through a landscape.” The landscape in this case — the subject of the book, really — is the Lower East Side, which Mr. Price depicts as a neighborhood of colliding populations: the few remaining Jewish old-timers; the people from the projects; the La Bohèmers, as he calls them, the trust-fund couples with their M.F.A.’s and videocams; the Chinese immigrants, many of them illegal, who sleep, stacked on shelves, in some of the old tenements.

The book’s hero — if you can call him that — is a 35-year-old named Eric Cash, a restaurant manager with a drug conviction who has done a little acting, published a short story in a defunct literary magazine and is now working — or rather, not working — on his screenplay. He’s modeled partly on himself, Mr. Price said. “He’s me if what has been hadn’t been. I’ve always been interested in when the hyphen disappears — you know, actor-waiter, cabdriver-writer — and you have to settle for who you are.” Every now and then you sense that Mr. Price may still feel a little hyphenated himself, with one foot in the old Lower East Side, where he no longer strictly belongs, and one foot in the present, whose permanence he distrusts a little.
About the Lower East Side today, Mr. Price said, “This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.” He added that he sometimes thinks of the neighborhood as a very busy ghost town, where many of the ghosts milling around still speak Yiddish.

Mr. Price’s last three novels have all been set in a fictional city he calls Dempsy, loosely based on Jersey City. “The whole idea of Dempsy was I didn’t want to feel journalistically beholden to a real place,” he said. “It was the other place, the one next to wherever you are. But to fictionalize the Lower East Side would defeat the whole purpose. What drew me was the place itself.”
He added that he originally thought of writing a historical novel, one that would dramatize the experience of the immigrant Jews who thronged the Lower East Side a hundred years ago. “But then I realized that’s probably the most well-documented immigrant movement in history,” he said. “A guy comes over here, and his first job is working in a sweatshop. His second job is writing a novel about a guy working in a sweatshop. How am I going to do this better than Henry Roth did?”