Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Richard Price writes what he hears

Richard Price may look like he's just hanging out, but actually, he's doing research for his next novel.

By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published March 16, 2008

''This book began with a place," says Richard Price. "I didn't really have a story."

He found one. The book is Lush Life, Price's gripping new bestseller about a murder in New York's Lower East Side.

Writing it involved a kind of "urban archaeology," Price says, an exploration of the neighborhood's history as a densely populated landing place for new immigrants - "a place to get out of" - and its current status as a gentrified magnet for the young and hip. He built Lush Life on its "juxtaposition of tenement buildings and boutiques" and colliding "chaos of cultures."

Price lived in the Lower East Side for a while himself, and his family's history there goes back much further. "It's full of ghosts."

Lush Life is Price's first novel in five years, after Samaritan in 2003. A screenwriter celebrated for such movies as The Color of Money, he has for several years been on the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which recently completed a five-season run marked by critical acclaim.

Price was in St. Petersburg in January because of his connection with fellow Wire writer and novelist (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River) Dennis Lehane. The annual Writers in Paradise conference at Eckerd College is Lehane's baby, and Price came to give the opening night address.

Before heading home - he's a lifelong New Yorker, raised in the Bronx, now living in Gramercy Park - Price talked about Lush Life and the writing life.

The novel revolves around the murder of a brash, likable young bartender, Ike, during what seems to be a bungled robbery. Its main characters are Eric Cash, an aspiring actor-screenwriter-restaurateur and actual bartender, who worked with Ike and becomes a suspect; Tristan Acevedo, a rootless young petty criminal; and Matty Clark, a cynical detective working the case.

Price says he doesn't think of himself as a crime writer, but "the investigation of a crime is an automatic narrative" to shape a story around. It also made room for the wildly diverse cast of characters that populates the book. Over and over in Lush Life, characters connected to the case cross paths without knowing it.

"They don't see each other," Price says, even though they live in the same few blocks. "Everyone turns invisible. A lot of people don't want to be seen." The young hipsters from middle-class backgrounds don't see the broken kids from the projects, and neither group notices the illegal Chinese immigrants who, in one stunning scene, sleep in shifts crammed into an apartment where each man sublets his few square feet of space to others while he's awake.

"That was a real place," Price says. "It's right there in plain sight." The cops working the murder case see more, but they don't always see clearly.

Capturing all of those different characters so vividly requires "a lot of homework. But it's not pointed; I don't do it in the library or the Hall of Records.

"It's basically hanging out, absorbing how people talk, how they act. I hang out with everybody. It's a way of putting off the actual writing."

Price says that during the three years he was writing Lush Life he avoided most screenwriting work. "They're too different. It takes one kind of head to do one, another kind for the other. With movies, you're not the author."

But screenwriting has long supported his fiction. "I know very few writers of fiction who can make a living from books." With the writers strike over, he's at work on another screenplay, an adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's new novel Child 44.

Price says he enjoyed writing for The Wire and is working on a pilot for another cable series. One of his two daughters, actor Genevieve Hudson-Price, appeared in several episodes of The Wire: "She played an addict. She had a nice little monologue" in a recent episode.

With Lush Life's New York setting, Price left behind the fictional Dempsy, N.J., setting for his novels Clockers, Freedomland and Samaritan. That doesn't mean he won't return in other novels, he says. "You understand what your turf is. Faulkner had that county in Mississippi; I have this fictional Jersey city. It's just a canvas."

Speaking of canvas, Lush Life is one of the few crime novels to have a presence in the Museum of Modern Art. Price collaborated on a book with his wife, painter Judith Hudson, that combines her abstract paintings with "small chunks of this book." A friend in Mexico handmade only 35 copies, each one unique.

Lush Life's title is borrowed from Billy Strayhorn's jazz standard, written in 1936. Price says, "I didn't even know the lyrics. I just liked that sense of abundant life" the title suggests.

"Then I found out the song is all about drunks and terminal melancholy."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.

[Last modified March 12, 2008, 17:01:01]