'Lush Life' in lower Manhattan
AUTHOR Q&A | Richard Price changes venue but remains 'in the projects'
After setting three acclaimed novels in the mythical, crime-infested burg of Dempsy, N.J., Richard Price returns to his native New York City in his new novel, Lush Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 464 pages, $26). Much like the Jacob Riis photos the book occasionally mentions, the book captures a mix of class, race, and ambition on the Lower East Side. But it's also propulsive crime story, marked by Price's tremendous ear for dialogue. A screenwriter for films and for the TV show "The Wire," Price spoke about Lush Life in the context of his larger career.
Q. A lot of people divide your career into two phases -- your first four novels, and the ones since Clockers (1993).
A. Well, by the fourth novel [1983's The Breaks], I was in trouble because I didn't have anything else to write about, and it didn't stop me from writing, unfortunately. The thing they have in common is that the first [four] were based on my own experiences whereas after that I'm not a character in my books anymore, which is the way I like it. What they have in common is, The Wanderers (1974) is about the housing projects in the Bronx. And now, in Lush Life, it's 30 years later, I'm writing about a project on East River Drive. I'm still in the projects.
Q. I haven't read The Breaks...
A. Don't bother. I don't think even I read The Breaks.
Q. But it seems that there's a seriocomic tone in those early novels that disappears by the time Clockers comes out. It's more raw and straightforward.
A. I don't know if I was being pointedly unfunny or deadly earnest. Comedy comes out of comedy; it comes out of real situations, the drama of a situation. So in Lush Life I feel the comedy comes out of the speed of the dialogue. The hardest thing in the world, and the thing that's hardest for me, is being funny in purpose. You just gotta trust the natural juice of banter to create its own comedy.
Q. You seem conflicted about what's happening to the Lower East Side in Lush Life?
A. You know, people are pissed off that Times Square has become Anywhere U.S.A. -- generic, bland shops, sherbet-colored pants on tourists. "Where did all the dirty stuff go?" It's ambiguous because, on one hand people romanticize it, but ... that was the boulevard of broken dreams. There was some bad s--- going on in Times Square. I don't particularly like what's there now -- in fact, I can't stand to go there. But that doesn't mean that what was there was so wonderful.
The way I feel about [Lush Life] -- I'm just trying to write about when worlds collide. People occupy the same physical space -- the Lower East Side, the 7th Precinct, the smallest precinct in Manhattan, it's 1.7 miles or something like that. You have 30 percent Chinese, a large amount of which are undocumented. You have probably an equal number of Hispanic, you've got a smaller number of tightly knit orthodox Jewish, and you've got all these MFA kids, all these "La bohemers," most of them on their parents' dime, coming down here, turning Ludlow Street and Eldridge Street. They think they're in "Rent," except they don't have to pay the rent. And it's like every world is utterly oblivious -- they're occupying the same physical space and walking right through each other, right past each other, and not seeing each other.
My family, like many families at the turn of the 20th century, came over and started out on the Lower East Side, and they had a really hard time like everybody. They were really clawing. Every penny counted. Now my kids go down there and they know where to get the best gelato, where to get the coolest T-shirts, and which bars you can go to where you won't get carded. And where the best clubs are -- it's like kiddieland. But they're oblivious to the irony of the five-generation full-circle. And for the price of that ice cream cone my grandfather probably could've eaten for a week. So there's a lot of ghosts down there.
Q. Were you done with Dempsy when you wrote Lush Life?
A. I could've just as easily have gone back to Dempsy and written 7,000 more books -- it's the world. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a colander. I was compelled to write about the Lower East Side because it's always haunted me, always bugged me. The irony always got to me, and I didn't intend to hang with police to make police characters. But once again, how do you write a world that's sort of Byzantine and chaotic. How do you streamline it? And I always found that a good way to see the world is from the back of a police car. Because you see things that are not apparent.
Somebody once said that the fact that something happened is the excuse of the poor novelist. I just wanted to see more than I could see. Same problem with Clockers: too much stuff, too much stuff. I was getting addicted, running with everybody I could get my hands on. I didn't realize what's the story, what's the story, what's the story.
And then there were a couple of crimes that were the juxtaposition of those two worlds. What I found is that the investigation of a crime is a very efficient horse to ride through a very chaotic landscape. The need of an investigation is to be orderly. You take in all the peripheral people -- the family of the victim, the friends, the shooters, the courts, where the victim went. "Whoever did this, there were two people robbed, one was a Chinaman, the other Israeli," Great. Get my Chinaman and Israeli in there. If you follow the natural progression, it offers you a spine, a straight line.
Mark Athitakis is arts editor at Washington City Paper. He blogs at americanfiction.wordpress.com.