Despite his success—bestselling books, awards, film adaptations, critical acclaim—Richard Price, who typically works seven days a week, admits he doesn’t enjoy writing all that much.
“If someone could give me a pill that would make me unconscious and my head would fall on a piece of paper and, when I came to, lo and behold, there was a manuscript here, that would be great,” Price, dressed in a white button down, says via Zoom from his desk at the top of the Harlem brownstone where he’s lived since 2008. “But there’s no such pill.”
Price writes about social issues around violence, drugs, race, and identity with unparalleled precision, and counts James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Lenny Bruce’s stand-up among his early influences. His nine previous novels—including The Wanderers, his 1974 debut about a Bronx gang; Clockers, a seminal book about cops and crack dealers in fictional Dempsey, N.J., which became a Spike Lee movie; and Lush Life, a crime story set on the Lower East Side in the early aughts—have been translated into more than 15 languages. His screen credits include The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and the HBO series The Night Of.
And while he continues to juggle books and scripts, he insists, “I’m a novelist first, no matter how many screenplays I write.” His new novel, Lazarus Man (FSG, Nov.), is his first in nearly 10 years. It’s a big-canvas novel about second chances and lost love that’s also one of his most sensitive. Set in 2008 in East Harlem, it focuses on four characters whose lives are impacted by the collapse of a tenement building that kills several inhabitants and leaves others missing.
Price was born in the Bronx in 1949 and grew up in a housing project, where he was nicknamed Mr. Vocabulary. He has cerebral palsy—the result of a breech birth—a condition that affected his muscles and has left him with limited use of his right hand. “My grandma used to say, ‘Okay, you’re a little bit of a cripple, but goddamn you have a mind on you, boy,’ ” Price says. “If my hand wasn’t messed up, I don’t know if I would’ve been a writer. It made me an outsider.”
After receiving his BA from Cornell University in industrial labor relations in 1971, Price told his parents he wanted to get an MFA in writing. “They freaked out,” he says. “They said, ‘What are you going to do, drive a cab while you’re thinking of a poem?’ ” While working toward his MFA at Columbia University, he wrote furiously, and by the time he graduated in 1976, he’d published two novels.
In the early ’80s, Price began writing screenplays to make extra money and developed a cocaine addiction that lasted several years. “I’d write 100 great pages on coke, but they were for 100 different projects,” he recalls. “It was a low time.” In 1984, he married his first wife, then got sober and had two daughters. The pair divorced in 2010, and, in 2012, Price married novelist Lorraine Adams, whom he calls his “raw-hearted twin.”
As Price’s screenwriting career kicked into gear in the late ’80s, he hit the streets for inspiration. While writing the 1989 movie Sea of Love, he started going on ride-alongs with cops—something he continued to do when he returned to novels in the ’90s. “I don’t want to write; I want to talk to people,” Price says of doing field research for his projects. “It’s my social life.”
David Simon, creator of The Wire, used Clockers as inspiration for his hit HBO series, for which Price became a writer. “Clockers read like The Grapes of Wrath for the ’80s cocaine epidemic,” Simon says. “Richard is a vacuum cleaner when it comes to any world he’s trying to create. If he’s writing about cops, they’re the realest cops you’ve ever heard talk. His milieu has often been crime, but he’s a literary writer. I was always a little enamored of him.”
Price’s dialogue—whether New York cop-speak or street slang—is evocative and witty, while his artful explorations of human nature are windows into worlds beyond our own. Both are clearly on display in Lazarus Man. In the wake of the tenement collapse, the novel follows Anthony Carter, an unemployed former addict who’s pulled from the rubble and becomes a media sensation, all the while hiding a secret; Mary Roe, a cop obsessed with finding one of the missing residents; Felix Pearl, a mixed-race photographer searching for his “true tribe” in a gentrifying Harlem; and Royal Davis, a funeral parlor owner who hopes the collapse will generate business.
As the book unfolds, Price tenderly explores the emotional lives and romantic entanglements of his characters. Mary struggles to navigate a platonic relationship with her ex-husband while dating a man who wants more than she can give. Anthony falls for a woman from the neighborhood, exposing himself to rejection and pain.
A real-life building collapse in 2014 near Price’s home sparked the idea for Lazarus Man, his first work set in Harlem. “When that building fell, I felt it in my jawbone—the boom, the vibrations—and I was down there in half an hour, picking up this POV, that POV,” Price says. “If I’d written about Harlem the first year after I moved here it would’ve sounded like a Popeye travelogue. But after a while, when the amazing becomes normal, when your eyes and mind calm down, that’s when you pick up on nuances. Sometimes, you can go to the corner store for mint Milanos and come back with a chapter. It’s just living.”
It’s these keen powers of observation that, according to Price’s editor, Jonathan Galassi, make him an artist. “He’s very perceptive,” Galassi says. “He writes about the city from a vernacular point of view and knows it from the inside.”
And while Price is known for his gritty work, his agent, Lynn Nesbit, describes him as a one-of-a kind novelist with a gentle touch. “For all the rough and tumble of his books, there’s a sensitivity to Richard that often doesn’t get mentioned,” Nesbit says. “He’s incomparable.”
These days, Price is more content with life than ever. He recently became a grandfather, and despite those grumblings about wanting a magic writing pill, he’s having fun and growing as a writer. “Nobody thinks about it, but fun is so important,” he says. “You never want to stop being a student, and I still have that eagerness to learn.”
