E-mail a friendRichard Price
airdate April 28, 2008
Richard Price is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter, known for exploring the urban world in all of its nuanced grittiness. His eight books include the national best-sellers Freedomland, Clockers and, his latest, Lush Life. He's also written numerous screenplays, including The Color of Money, which was nominated for an Oscar, and Shaft. Price won an '07 Edgar Award for his writing on the acclaimed HBO series, The Wire. The Bronx, NY native has taught writing at Columbia, Yale, NYU and Cornell.
Richard Price
Tavis: Richard Price is an award-winning author whose books include "Clockers," "Freedomland," and "The Wanderers." He's also an Oscar-nominated screenwriter of movies like "The Color of Money." His latest book is one of, if not the most critically acclaimed novel of 2008. The book is called "Lush Life" and is now a "New York Times" bestseller. Richard Price, nice to have you on the program.
Richard Price: Thanks for having me.
Tavis: When you walked in I just said to you, you did it again. Another one of these.
Price: Yeah, and I kept looking over my shoulder because I didn't know who you were talking to.
Tavis: I'm like no, I'm talking to you. (Laughs) You did it again. Let me start by asking this: I read somewhere, somebody told me - maybe my producer, Vanessa, told me - that you describe this not as a crime novel but as a novel with a crime in it. What's the difference?
Price: Right. Well, I'm not writing - a crime novel is a genre novel, which is to say that plot is more important than character, and things are going to unfold. This is - I've been trying to write about the Lower East Side for, like, 25 years, and it's such a complex cosmos down there, I couldn't figure out how to get it all in without it looking like a travelogue.
And like in "Clockers" I realized if you center it with a crime and you follow an investigation, there's something about investigations. They're very orderly, they're chronological, everything is done for a reason - even if they're messing up, there's a reason to interview this guy. And I just found a crime the best horse I could ride through this very complex landscape and get to the other end in a linear way.
Tavis: Well, you got there. What was it, what is it about the Lower East Side that made you, for 25 years, struggle with how to write about it?
Price: Well, like a lot of eastern Europeans on the east coast, probably the west coast, too, this was the - they came off the boat and they landed there. They looked around and they said, "We've got to get the hell out of here," and they propelled about 50 years of American success stories - just get me out of here. And so all my grandparents are from there, like a lot of people.
And it's always been like this mythical place in my childhood. And all of a sudden, it becomes a place for the kids in their twenties to go to, so. And it became a playground for them. And my own kids, I realized, knew the Lower East Side better than I did. But what they knew was where the best clubs are, where to meet their friends, which bars don't card you. (Laughter) But I was not sure that they knew that 110 years ago their great-grandfather was getting put in handcuffs about 100 feet from where they were buying a Chairman Mao t-shirt.
And then I realized a lot of these kids that are coming down here now are fifth generation Lower East Siders who've sort of, like, completely lost the connection to where the family started out. And now they were making this ironic full circle, and it was just this homing thing. It was tough, though, because you'd think the Lower East Side, if you're going to write about it, you write a historical novel, because there's been a ton of them.
And then it dawned on me - well, I wasn't there. Let's see what's there now. And I come down, I know about the kids, and I know that there's housing projects down there, but I didn't realize - that place is like Byzantium. There's an enormous population of Fujinese-Chinese, a lot of them undocumented, working for slave wages just like the Jews did in 1900.
There's the Orthodox Jews, there's the Hispanics - Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, living in the un-rehabbed tenements. There's this whole squad of, like, old hippies. They're the entrepreneurs now and the realtors. And also the last population down there - the ghosts. The ghosts never go away. And it's a place where the transition is so quick that you can do archaeology without even needing a spoon.
All you've got to do is look up and see the paint and what used to be under the paint, see the pitted gargoyle, stone gargoyles over some 17-Toke Zagat restaurant. And the guy who did that gargoyle up there, it was 1890, he was the last guy who knew how to do that stonework, and immigrants lived there. And now you've got a restaurant on the ground floor which the price of a meal would probably be equivalent to six months' rent.
Tavis: This is not the first time you've done this. You do it, quite frankly, in all of your books. How do you get the language just right? I get the sense that you must spend a lot of - by your answer, and I didn't want to interrupt you - by your answer now, clearly you've done your research. You've been down there and spent some time down there. I assume that's the answer, but you tell me, though, how much time you spend to make sure that the language, that the verse -
Price: Well, you know what? They call it fiction - I make it up. I'll hang with people just enough to capture the tone and the spirit and the rhythm of their speech, and every socio-economic group, every job, every level of income has its own way of getting across its thoughts. And if you're a good mimic and you have a good ear, you just get enough.
But I'm not taking down - like, could you repeat that phrase? I don't do that, because it's not about that. It's about going home feeling like I got the gist of how these guys talk, and I do improv.
Tavis: So how - I always let the author, when I interview novelists, let them tell what the storyline is, because I'm always scared of giving too much away. So how would you describe what "Lush Life" is?
Price: Well, what "Lush Life" is is about all these planets of the Lower East Side, you know, like there are nine planets or eight planets, and they're orbiting the same streets but they're oblivious to each other, except every once in a while they bump into each other about 3:00 in the morning.
And it'll be kids from the projects going into, like, the Zagat area, flashing a gun on two kids that are bar-hopping that probably came from out of New York, and they're just looking to scare somebody, get money for Chinese take-out, but this is where - the only time that these worlds intersect.
And sometimes because neither party understands or knows the other party, somebody does something real stupid and somebody gets hurt or dies. And then you have headlines for five days, and on day six, everybody goes back to their own worlds.
Tavis: These two characters, for me, were interesting - Eric and Ike? Yeah, and?
Price: Well, see, Ike is - the whole world down there, it's a young person's - that particular, like the middle class world, it's a very young person's world. And real estate and Giuliani, they sort of converted the Lower East Side from one of the most desperate places to one of the most tony, affluent, "La Boehme" playgrounds. It's like being in "Rent," but with a credit card.
And the people, they don't - the kids don't see the Fujinese, the Fujinese don't see the Dominicans, the Dominicans don't see the Orthodox Jews, the Orthodox Jews don't see the hippies, the hippies - nobody sees anybody. So what the book is about is a clash between people who know nothing about each other who, an hour before, if they saw each other, would walk right through each other. But now there's a gun and there has to be a conversation, and tragedy ensues.
Tavis: Are there lessons that you're trying to get us to pay attention to, or are you just writing here and it's not about - it's just about telling a story, but not about teaching lessons?
Price: I really believe in that if you want to send a message, go to Western Union. All I want to do is bear witness. (Laughter) I will see what I see, and I'll write about it as faithfully as I can without feeling any journalistic obligations, because I'm not a journalist, and I'll lay it out for you, this encounter between cops and kids.
And you feel about it what you feel about it, because I learned a long time ago if you had 10 people watching a fight between a man and a woman, and they couldn't hear what they're talking about, and all of a sudden one of them slaps the other, if you ask all 10 people all right, sit down and write what you saw, you'd have 10 wildly different stories.
So when you got a place like this, or anyplace, all you got to do is be a camera. Be an artist, too, but be a camera, people will decide for themselves what it's about.
Tavis: But does it make Richard Price happy, though, to know that after people read the novel that they're engaging in conversation about various aspects of it? You're not trying to send a message, I got it - this ain't Western Union. But does it make you happy that they're in conversation about some of the issues, the complex social, political, economic, cultural issues that you raise in the book?
Price: Oh, hell, yeah. Books - I don't really think books change people that much, because they're books. Other than Teddy Roosevelt reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and creating the Food and Drug Administration. But yes, I'm really that they can talk about this.
Tavis: When you - because you've had experience at this now, when you put a book together, are you already thinking ahead? It's just a book, to your point, but books are not just books, books become movies, as you well know. So are you already thinking ahead nowadays when you're writing a book about the movie, or if it happens, it happens?
Price: No, never. It takes every baby brain cell I have just to put the book down. If in my mind I start flipping out and thinking about wow, George Clooney would be - it's insane. (Laughter) Every brain cell that is not working on the task at hand is working against the task at hand. It's like I never think of that stuff.
Tavis: That's a great quote: "Every brain cell not working on the task at hand is working against the task at hand." I'll give you attribution for that the first time I use it.
Price: It's a freebie.
Tavis: After that, it's just mine.
Price: Okay.
Tavis: All right. (Laughter) Richard Price's new book, "Lush Life." A novel by the author of "Clockers" and a lot of other good stuff. Richard, nice to have you on the program.
Price: Oh, thank you for having me.
Tavis: All the best to you.
Back to April 28, 2008