WHAT other novelists refer to as research, Richard Price calls “hanging out”. Most often, this means spending time with police officers in and around New York, whose experience tends to have a direct bearing on the stories that Price chooses to tell. For the sake of specificity, he may also need to sit in on staff meetings with local restaurant managers and community outreach workers – as he did for his latest novel, Lush Life – or to participate in drug deals on dark corners of certain housing projects, if only as an observer. “They don’t give a shit,” says Price of his sources in the so-called underworld, who are usually described in his fiction as nothing more or less dramatic than members of a socially, racially, and economically marginalised underclass.
“They don’t read the books. “The only thing they want to know is whether it’s going to mess them up to have a writer around. It would seem that the answer is yes, but if I can communicate to them that I’m not a journalist, I’m not a police informer, I’m just trying to write about a character who looks like them, then they might be intrigued enough to talk to me.”
This method generates more anecdotes than he can use, the most oft-repeated of which is the one about the New Jersey crack trader who simply refused to believe that Price was not a cop, until the frightened author grabbed one of his books from the car and opened it to show his photo on the jacket. The dealer flicked backwards from the last page and asked Price of his contemporary crime-based subject matter: “What the hell do you know for 276 pages?”
If his recent bestsellers – Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan and now Lush Life – have been increasingly reportorial in their concern for accuracy, it’s because Price asks himself that same question throughout his research process, and doesn’t begin actually writing until he knows almost as much as any given expert in the field. “That’s a real issue for me,” he says. “I’ve become so intent on going after the right people and absorbing all the details that it gets to the point where I’m thinking, ‘Okay, now you know how they walk in this neighbourhood, do you need to know how they run? Or whether they place their forks on the inside of their plates?’ I have to smack myself to start writing, and remind myself that you’re allowed to make shit up in fiction. In fact, you’re supposed to.” In this respect, he shares his highest standards and priorities with David Simon, creator of hyper-acclaimed TV series The Wire, who hired Price (along with like-minded crime novelists Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos) to write episodes for its latter three seasons. As with his own books, the show was most vocally praised for its journalistic approach to storytelling, which amounted to a rigorous investigation of systematic policy failure in urban America, and the consequences for the poorest residents of inner-city Baltimore.
“The first thing that strikes people is the verisimilitude,” says Price, giving all the credit to David Simon and his co-producer Ed Burns. “The Wire was plausible and then some. But everyone got a little swept away by that believability. It’s really the creative stuff that holds everything together. The stuff you make up.” Lush Life was first published last year, not long after the last episode of The Wire was broadcast in the US. The story of a random, pointless murder on the relatively safe and clean streets of modern Manhattan’s semi-gentrified lower east side, it is the best-reviewed and biggest-selling book of Price’s long and successful career so far. He says he can only speculate as to why, although he knows how much that particular television programme raised his profile.
The critics have always been kind, especially as regards his obvious gift for putting the exact right words in each character’s mouth, but this time they are calling him the greatest writer of dialogue in the English language. “After Lush Life, I might never write another line of dialogue,” says Price. “Next time I’ll be too intimidated.” It is sometimes assumed that this is a matter of transcription – that because he spent several years hanging out on the lower east side, no special effort was required to reproduce what he heard or overheard in the district’s police stations, old tenements, and shiny new brasseries. The New Yorker’s James Wood was perhaps the first to stress the true artistry behind Price’s rendering of everyday speech, and to suggest that he does not merely have an “ear” for dialogue, but a “mind” for it. “It is all invention,” confirms Price, who is not in the habit of complimenting himself. “I might spend a lot of time with the kind of people I’m writing about, and I might hear things that make me turn my head, but when I sit down at my desk, I’m turning everything over like a washing machine. It’s not about glossary, or anthropology, it’s about getting the spirit right.” Asked if he was a keen listener as a kid, Price remembers being slightly better than his friends at mimicking whole exchanges from the Rod Sterling or Paul Newman movies they watched the night before. He grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s, when Jewish families like his own were not quite as rare as they later became in that decaying borough of New York. His father was a cab driver and freelance window dresser, and both parents watched a lot of TV.
“They didn’t own any books. After high school they never gave a second thought to going to college. Of course, the whole point of the housing projects for their generation was that my generation would [itals] go to college, so my own reading was always encouraged.” Price had never left the city until he went to study upstate at Cornell University, and has not strayed very far since, teaching the occasional writing course at Columbia, Yale and NYU, and working for Hollywood only at a distance. His Bronx-based debut novel, The Wanderers, was published when Price was just 24, and adapted into a film in 1979, beginning a relationship with the movie studios that has allowed him to adapt his subsequent books into screenplays for Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese (Clockers was directed by the former and produced by the latter). He and Scorsese, both pathological New Yorkers, have collaborated many times over the years, most notably on The Colour Of Money – Price’s script was Oscar-nominated – and most oddly on the famous gangland dance-off video for Michael Jackson’s Bad. “It sounded like a great idea … ” says Price, reluctant to speak ill of the dead after hinting in the past that Jackson’s appearance may have slightly undercut the hard edge of his eight-page scenario for the project. “Looking back, I think it’s cool I did it.”
These various jobs on the side have effectively paid for Price’s works of literature, as well as his daughters’ education, a townhouse in upmarket Gramercy Park, and a summer retreat out on Long Island. His writing career corresponds with the gradual cleanup of New York City – the fall of its crime rate and the rise of its property prices. Lush Life describes those dual processes as creating their own kind of conflict. “Real estate is violence, and the price you pay for upscaleness is the death of character. I’m not nostalgic for the Times Square of the 1970s, which was a dirty and desperate place that has gotten warm and fuzzy in people’s memories. In terms of quality-of-life, would you rather see pimps on the corners, or a hit musical version of The Lion King? Well, isn’t there a happy medium? Personally, I would prefer to hang out with the pimps, because my writing is like that.”
For this reason, or “to keep alert and alive” as he puts it, Price and his wife, the painter and author Judith Hudson, moved uptown to Harlem last year, where they watched Obama win the presidency on a big screen outside in the street, surrounded by their mostly black new neighbours. It was, he says, “one of the best moments of my life”, even if he has no particular faith in Obama’s capacity to change the facts that go into his fiction. Lush Life, like The Wire, offers very little hope for the future. Except, perhaps, for Price’s obvious pleasure in language, and especially in speech. Dialogue, by definition, is good, right? “Sometimes just the fact that people are talking seems like an optimistic act, rather than going off alone into some hall to die. I don’t know how far to carry that, but I will say that dialogue gives you the life. People are breathing when they talk.”
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