Richard Price, American Realist.

• Author: D'Ambrosio, Antonino
• Position: Critical essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Spanning a career now into its fourth decade, Richard Price has set himself apart as a rare writer by capturing the gray area of living in America. In his latest book, Lush Life , Price brings a Jacob Riis-like approach to the narrative, documenting a new lower Manhattan where rents surpass $2,000 for a studio apartment that 100 years earlier housed eight immigrants and cost $12 a month. As the Danish American journalist, photographer, and social reformer did a century before in the same Lower East Side of New York, Price opens a window onto a world mostly ignored. While gentrification has reshaped the complexion of the neighborhood, it's done little to change the plight of the underclass that the city has come to depend on to do its most menial jobs. Price even discovers a huge immigrant population from China's Fujian province, living like ghosts invisible to almost everyone around them.

"Like the Jews during Riis's time, everything and everyone is living cheek and jowl down there," Price tells me. "There is no antagonism down here, there's no project homeys versus Midwestern laptopers. There's none of that tension because they don't notice each other. Everyone's in their own world. Even though they occupy the same physical space, they just pass each other by like it's a race."

Price understands that this lack of interaction leads to brief moments of explosion and tragedy. "It's like these planets that are miraculously orbiting the same circuit and never crash," he says, "except once in a while when some kids in the project try to go into the golden interior and jack somebody for money and go out and get Chinese food or whatever."

Project kids jacking someone for money is the action that sets things in motion in Price's new book. The narrative spins on a mugging that goes wrong when a young white hipster brazenly defies a mugger, a young Latino kid, with the fatal words, "not tonight, my man." For one brief moment, these alien worlds smash into one another.

"That's where you have the great tragic culture clash," Price explains. "He's never had a gun in his face before, he's drunk and not particularly street smart and it's like, forget it, while the kid with the gun doesn't understand that there are people around that don't understand what a gun in the face means."

Price says he's been to thirty-two murder crime scenes. Thirty of the victims were black or Latino. None of the minority murders brought out the media or a...