Author Richard Price, whose crime novel Lush Life explores a crime in Manhattan's Lower East Side. (Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

Not every great city gets the chroniclers it deserves, but no one could say that New York has been shortchanged. Indeed, its places and people have been preserved in fictional and non-fictional forms by everyone from Edith Wharton and Herbert Asbury to Damon Runyan and Jimmy Breslin to Tom Wolfe and Jay McInerney. But much of the city these writers captured has long disappeared from view. New York has been transformed many times over by the migration of communities and movement of wealth in, out and across its five boroughs.

Richard Price has witnessed a fair share of change in his six decades as a New Yorker. He set his first book, The Wanderers (1974) — published when he was just 24 — in a place very much like the Bronx housing project where he grew up. He didn’t stray far from home for many of his Hollywood screenplays, like the Al Pacino thriller Sea of Love (1989) and Martin Scorsese’s segment of the 1989 omnibus movie New York Stories. Price would later set some of his best-known books in a fictitious version of neighbouring Jersey City. The most notable one was Clockers (1992), his ruthlessly stark, frank and compelling novel about the inner-city drug trade that was the official basis for Spike Lee’s 1995 film version and the unofficial one for The Wire, the lionized HBO series that recruited him as a writer. But New York has always stayed a big part of him.

One reason that Lush Life, his new novel, is so startling is that Price is able to look at a corner of the city with a perspective that is both seasoned and remarkably fresh. Published earlier this year to wide acclaim — and with sufficiently healthy sales to put Price on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time — Lush Life is the story of a violent crime that shakes up the lives of new and old denizens of the Lower East Side, an area that has undergone a particularly dramatic transformation. As Price explained in an interview during the International Festival of Authors in Toronto last month, the former tenement buildings on these streets are now home to luxury lofts and gastropubs, but traces of “the old New York” cannot be easily scrubbed away.

“For most of the people of a certain background in New York — southern Europeans, eastern Europeans — that’s where the boat dropped you,” Price says of the Lower East Side. (His accent bears all of what you’d associate with the language he calls “New York-ese.”) “And they sort of moved on and out, and they became your grandparents.”

Price always wanted to write about the area because of his family connections there, but he didn’t know what he could write that hadn’t been written before. “So at some point, I just went down there,” Price says. “I saw kids like my own kids down there. But I found all these different ethnic groups down there I hadn’t expected to see. There’s this massive Chinese population. There’re the housing projects, which I completely forgot about. There are the orthodox Jews, there’s black and there’s Arabic — it’s a stew down there. I just figured, ‘Jeez, somebody should write about this place right now.’

“That’s because it’s also going through this violent real estate change. You know, there’d be some apartment where 15 years ago you’d see a line of junkies passing money through a hole in the wall and getting a bag of dope back — now, that apartment is going for $1.5 million. I just wanted to write about all this turmoil and transition.”

(Douglas & McIntyre)

The extent of that turmoil may be a surprise to those who’ve grown accustomed to reading about New York as a playground for the rich and the Lower East Side as a vibrant haven for moneyed young would-be bohemians.

“Well, the young white kids get all the ink,” Price says. “It’s like they’re in Rent, except they have credit cards. But that was a shock to me that, in fact, they are not the majority. You think everything is highrise buildings going up and rehabbed tenements going for a lot of money. There are still so many streets where you don’t hear English, where you smell fish heads and dirty ice getting dumped, Buddhist temples, housing-project kids — that place is huge. I think the kids that are down there now are getting a disproportionate amount of the attention.”

The incident that drives Lush Life involves a trio of white and privileged Lower East Siders who are robbed early one morning by a pair of teens from the nearby projects. The crime leaves one of the three dead and another — Eric, a 35-year-old restaurant manager and wannabe screenwriter — under the scrutiny of local detectives. The investigators try to discover the truth amid the maelstrom of media attention, yet the walls between the neighbourhood’s various tribes remain solid.

“That’s the other phenomenon,” says Price. “Everybody is occupying the same physical space and there’s no real hostility — it’s just that they don’t notice each other. If you’re not part of my little chip of the world, I don’t even see you. The orthodox Jews don’t look at the Dominicans, the Dominicans don’t recognize the yuppies, the yuppies don’t recognize the Chinese, the Chinese don’t recognize anybody. It’s like 11 ships passing in the night and every once in a while, they’re going to have a head-on collision.”

At times like these, Richard Price really does talk like a character in a Richard Price novel. (At another point in the interview, he describes one character’s unchecked moment of candour as having “enough Freudian slips to open up a lingerie factory.”) The chewy, colourful and eminently quotable dialogue in Price’s books is New York-ese at its most authentic. That’s not to suggest that it doesn’t have the same degree of novelistic exaggeration popular among all the great chroniclers who preceded him. Whether or not the talk is perfectly accurate, it’s long been obvious that Price has an ear finely attuned to the ways his fellow New Yorkers express themselves. It’s something he attains only after spending countless hours talking and listening to the many different varieties of people he wants to portray.

“I’ll go out and hang out,” he says simply. “It’s like what Jimmy Breslin said about Damon Runyon: ‘He did what all good journalists did — he hung out.’ So I will hang out and I will bring back the news, but that’s the end of the preliminary stuff for me. My job is to make fiction, but only after I know what the parameters of plausibility are. If I want to make something up, I have to understand a thing well enough to know what is utter nonsense and what is plausible. Then, anything goes.”

Jason Anderson is a Toronto writer and the author of the novel Showbiz.