The Realist: Richard Price

AS A BORN-AND-BRED BRONX-HOUSING-PROJECTS KID, author Richard Price writes about what he knows best: inner-city life and its perils, nuances and menagerie of characters.

While Price is responsible for episodes of "The Wire" and movies including "Ransom" and "The Color of Money," he is best known as a novelist with a knack for dialogue and characters. His most recent book, "Lush Life" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells the story of a young man murdered on the Lower East Side in New York City and the cast of characters the neighborhood brings forth amidst the murder investigation.

There's Eric Cash, a witness to the murder and a manager at one of the trendy neighborhood bars. As he gets older, he finds himself becoming bitter that none of the great aspirations for himself — writing or acting — have panned out.

Then there's Tristan, a shy kid from an abusive home who finds himself befriending the drug dealers and users that typify "the projects." There are the cops working on the case, the Chinese immigrants silently dwelling en masse in the apartment buildings next to Cash's hip bar, the grieving father of murdered Ike Marcus and the two Yemeni brothers who run a mini-mart.

"Lush Life" is a kaleidoscope of characters, settings, crises and emotions that revolve around the Lower East Side, which Price calls "the main character."

"In [my] other books, I'd say it's about this individual or that individual, but the thing that drew me to the story was the neighborhood and its current state vis a vis its history," he said, referring to the throngs of immigrant Jews that populated the area a century ago. "The characters came then out of the neighborhood — they're all types of people that one would find in this neighborhood and not necessarily in any other neighborhood."

As the characters meet and interact with each other — police officer Matty Clark with the murder victim's father; Tristan with the empathetic cop Yolanda; the Yemeni brothers with Cash — they take on their own nuances in their roles.

It's the little character traits that make words on paper transform into a fully developed character, but Price doesn't blindly assign stereotypes to his creations, turning them into caricatures in the process. "You try to avoid caricaturization at all costs. That's two dimensions. ... I don't know any writer who consciously wants to create a caricature unless they're writing for Mad magazine."

Price explained how he keeps his characters in three dimensions, saying, "The case of the guys who are cops — there are certain things that are recognizable as 'cop' things and then you give them a private life and it's the nuances of somebody's private life" that create a character.

Clocking in at 455 pages, "Lush Life" is already pretty substantial, but Price said there were a couple hundred of pages that he and his editor had to cut out of the final manuscript, mostly dealing with the family of the "dead kid."

"My editor basically convinced me over a period of months that we could live without that. His point is grief, especially the father's grief — we got it real quick. To have another couple hundred pages, which is a variation on a theme, it's just hammering it over and over again. I think [the editor] was right," Price said.

"I don't regret it, but I try not to look at the cut pages. I'm invariably going to see something I wish was in."

Between the grief over a random murder, the living conditions of the Chinese immigrants and the multifaceted drug culture of both the projects and the police, "Lush Life" isn't exactly an uplifting book. Price deals with the situations honestly, without passing judgment or incorporating his political views into the narrative.

Yet, for all the problems he presents, he doesn't see the novel as a catalyst for social change.

"It's a book. I doubt it's going to make anybody leap up and do anything," he said.

"That's more like 'The Wire.' That's a TV show that will have people talking because of the sheer volume of people that watch it, as opposed to a book. If someone spends 26 bucks on a book, it's not going to change their life."

Spoken like a true realist.

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