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ichard 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.
But as Price himself points out, his reputation for being akin to his characters is somewhat warped. He was raised in a Bronx housing project, but back then it was much more mixed-race than today. Research demands he hang out with cops, but he shares none of their politics. And that notoriously authentic dialogue is invented by him, not taken from the streets. "You make shit up," Price says. "If something is plausible, that's all you need."
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Still, the writer of Clockers and several episodes of The Wire speaks in a voice nearly as gruff and clipped as his characters'. 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. — Will Doig
You're known for hanging out with the types of people you write about. How does that work?
There's no mystique about it. You just hang out with people, you soak up what they're about, you keep your ears and eyes open, you go home and write.
Who did you hang out with for this book?
With whoever would hang out with me. I hung out with restaurant workers primarily, then people in the projects, people who have businesses in the neighborhood, people who've just moved in, younger people, a couple of community-outreach people who work with the Chinese community. Whoever.
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| Richard Price |
You got approval to ride along with the NYPD, which isn't easy.
I hung out just as much with people who did other things as I did with the police, but yeah, me hanging out with the police tends to get the headlines because they're the police.
There's a scene in your book where the police go into an apartment that's home to thirty undocumented Chinese immigrants. Did that come directly from something you saw?
Some things I saw, some things I made up, and I'm not going to tell you which was which.
How do you feel about cops?
Politically? I never talk politics with these guys. They're much more right-wing. I'm just an old-fashioned liberal. I don't talk about Law & Order, I don't talk about Bush, I don't talk about Iraq. I'm not there to have a debate with them. I accept them for who they are.
Has spending time with cops changed your perception of them?
Not really. I grew up in a housing project in the 1960s, and at that time it was basically a mixed-race working-class environment, and whoever didn't go to college became a cop or a construction worker. I'm fifty-eight, twenty-five years older than the average cop, so I can't call them my contemporaries, but I know where these guys are coming from.
I'm from rural New England, and I get nervous around cops in New York. I always feel like they're looking to bust me for something. Do you?
No. They're looking for black kids, Puerto Rican kids. They all do racial profiling. They're not looking for rural New England.
Have you ever spent a night in jail?
No. I've been in jails, I've taught in jails, but not on the wrong side of the bars. I mean listen, it's fiction. You make shit up. All you're looking for are the parameters of plausibility. You don't want to write something that's absurd, but if something is plausible, that's all you need.
Does that go for the language as well?
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If it was the 1970s again, and I was an aspiring writer, I'd kill to live on the Lower East Side.
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How about the teenagers in the projects? Even the cops in your book had trouble getting them to open up. How'd you get them to talk?
Well, a lot of that is simply being teenagers. It's about coming off a certain way in front of your peers. And it wasn't like I didn't know about teenagers in housing projects. I'd meet people through people. I'd talk to somebody and they'd say, "For that you should really talk to this guy." Then I'd talk to that guy, and he'd say, "You should come into the projects with me," and then I'd meet a third guy. It's a chain reaction of connections, and I'm not sure where they're going to lead to until I get there.
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.
You grew up in a place and time when living in the city was about survival. Now your own kids are part of this privileged Lower East Side scene. Does that strike you as bizarre?
There's nothing bizarre about it at all. In fact, if I was their age and it was the 1970s again, and I was an aspiring writer, I'd kill to live on the Lower East Side. It's like a giant clubhouse for you and yours. What could be more fun? It's the obliviousness to the other people who are occupying the same physical streets as you are where the friction and the potential tragedy can sometimes lie. In terms of vanity, I felt like I was way too old for the Lower East Side all of a sudden. The Lower East Side was for the ghosts of my grandparents or for the lives of my own young kids, and I was in the middle, not really belonging.
I think there's a lot of nostalgia for a time when the city was more dangerous, usually coming from people who didn't live here then. Where does this nostalgia come from?
I think there's something in people that, whatever they feel is missing in them, at the present, they look back and idealize or romanticize a time. I think that's perpetual. Fifteen years from now, people will look back on now with longing, and you'll be thinking, what the hell are you longing for?
I there it's about bragging rights, too.
That, too, I think applies to people everywhere. People try to pull rank. It's like the whole concept of an O.G., an original gangster, but it could work for anything. An old movie guy saying, "I worked in Hollywood when making a movie really meant something."
What's the future of the Lower East Side?
I don't know. It seems like every time you turn your back to tie your shoe a building is gone and there's a ten-story super structure in the whole. I don't know if it's going to reach saturation point before it's all transformed. If you go up Delancey Street it's completely for the projects, and if you go up Clinton Street a bodega will be next to a five-star restaurant. And both are flirting with disaster, one because a restaurant is a precarious thing, and the bodega because whoever owns the building is trying to get them out and put another restaurant in.
One question about The Wire. Is it hard to write for an episodic show with other people's episodes bookending your own?
Yes and no. It's easy because you don't have a lot of choice in what you write. On the other hand, I can't think of anything more unappetizing than to not be able to write what you want. The Wire was like this assembly line, like any episodic television show, because everything has to set up the guy that comes after you, and follow up on the person who came before you. Under normal circumstances I would avoid writing for The Wire, except it's The Wire, in which, all bets are off. I just wanted to be part of that. n°
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©2008 hooksexup.com and Will Doig
Commentarium (19 Comments)
"It's easy because you don't have a lot of choice in what you write. On the other hand, I can't think of anything more unappetizing than to not be able to write what you want"