I admit: I was incredibly jealous when Hooksexup editor Will Doig told me he was going to interview Richard Price. I just recently discovered the joys of HBO’s The Wire (I know, I’m only a few years’ behind the times) and to sit and speak with one of the geniuses behind the scripts sounded like a dream come true…
As Will writes, “Richard Price's books appeal, in large part, because the author behind them has achieved near-mythical status for being the genuine article: he grew up in a housing project, hangs out with his characters (cops, thugs, undocumented immigrants), and, above all, writes more realistic dialogue than virtually any other novelist working today.
“His latest novel, Lush Life, takes place on Manhattan's gentrifying Lower East Side. In this small physical space, where rich hipsters, bodega owners and kids from the projects uneasily coexist, two homicide detectives slog through sludge-like bureaucracy and amnesiac eyewitnesses as they try to solve a murder. The book, however, feels more like an anthropological study of downtown New York than a police procedural, the story of a neighborhood changing so fast you can see it in the time-lapse feed of its own surveillance cameras. Price spoke to Hooksexup about mingling with the folks he portrays in his novels, and the strange popular nostalgia for the city's darker days."
I thought your portrayal of the Lower East Side hipster scene was surprisingly nonjudgmental.
Actually, I caught a lot of flack for the way I treated the quote-unquote hipsters. I was kind of surprised. Then I looked back on it, and I think I got too absorbed in the self-centeredness of some of these people. I mean, my kids are that age and part of that movement, that subculture. With my books, everybody tends to think everything I write is journalistically true, and it's not. If I had a chance to rewrite the book, I don't know if I'd undo that. This is how I'd experienced some people.
Read the entire interview here.