I
admit: I was incredibly jealous when Nerve 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 Nerve
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.
