Giving Back

Richard Price talks about his new novel, Samaritan, and the selfish side of altruism.

Interview by Frank Halperin

Nearly three decades after he made his sensational literary debut at 24 with The Wanderers (1974), Richard Price still remains the most evocative streetlife serenader in contemporary fiction. Long before Quentin Tarantino dazzled the public's consciousness with his manic aesthetic, the Bronx-born, projects-raised, Ivy League-schooled Price had already established himself as an urban hipster wunderkind through a succession of riveting novels (Bloodbrothers, Ladies' Man, The Breaks) whose visceral, intensely passionate narratives led The Washington Post in 1976 to comment: "Price does in fiction something like what Martin Scorsese is doing in film." Not so coincidentally, Price would go on to collaborate with his artistic soulmate, writing the screenplays for The Color of Money and Scorsese's third of New York Stories, in addition to scripting Sea of Love, Mad Dog and Glory and Night and the City, among others.

In his explosive new novel, Samaritan (Knopf), Price returns to the imaginary North Jersey city of Dempsy, the plight-ridden, racially charged setting for his last two books, Clockers (1992) and Freedomland (1998). Ray Mitchell, an Emmy-nominated TV writer, returns to his hometown to take a pro bono teaching job at his old high school, and to salvage his relationship with his teenage daughter, Ruby, after his divorce. Following his arrival, he is nearly beaten to death and hospitalized, whereupon a childhood acquaintance from the old neighborhood, detective Nerese "Tweetie" Ammons, takes on the case of finding the perpetrator -- the identity of whom is kept secret by a tight-lipped Ray. Shifting points of view between a too-gracious-to be-true Ray and the irrepressible Nerese, Samaritan is a methamphetamine jolt of suspense as well as a startling meditation on the noxious ramifications of altruism, delivered through the author's of pitch-perfect dialogue and vivid, superbly realized characterizations.

The interview took place on a bleak, wintry-mix morning, at the spacious Manhattan residence Price shares with his wife, painter Judith Hudson, and two daughters. Dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans, Price, 53, relaxed on a couch, metallic coffee mug in hand, conversing with the wit and insight that defines his work.

City Paper: What sparked the idea for Samaritan?

Richard Price: In the course of writing Freedomland and Clockers, I spent a lot of time in housing projects and the poorer neighborhoods of Jersey City and Hudson County in general, Newark and the Bronx also, and these people were helping me write my books by letting me into their lives. I was teaching too, I would go into the public schools in Jersey City and Newark, and you make an impression -- you know, you're a published writer, and it's off-the-cuff, you're being encouraging, you're charming, you don't have to yell at them because it's not your job. Then, well, you say, "I'm done with this project, I'm movin' on." I think I kept making people feel like I had ripped them off somehow. I started thinking about why was I doing this, above and beyond repaying people, and I thought, well, maybe it's a little bit because it's a rush, to go in and say, "Here I am, what can I do for you?" It's altruism, it's giving something, but you're also taking something above and beyond research for your book, and it's an ego hit. Because you see how positively people respond to things that are very easy for you to do, and so Samaritan became an exploration of how narcissism taints altruism.

CP: Did you actually have a confrontational experience like Ray Mitchell has in the book?

RP: No, it was in my head, the idea of "What would happen if ," and I kept extending it out in a fictional premise. The thing is, it's very easy to focus on the class difference, or the racial difference, or the haves and have-nots, but it's really not about that. The book's about people who, you know, get off on making a splash as opposed to making a dent. They think they're making a dent but what they really aim to do is to create a sensation. On the surface, it looks like all goodness, and then when people rebel or lash out against this goodness, they look ungrateful, like, "Look what they did to this Samaritan." But, in fact, the Samaritan is probably not such a Samaritan, because he's lookin' in the mirror half the time he's doing it. It doesn't make the person evil or even bad, it just makes him kind of self-centered and a little oblivious.

CP: From his terrace in Dempsy, Ray can gaze across the Hudson and take in New York City, and you subtly incorporate the 9/11 tragedy in Samaritan. What type of creative prudence went into acknowledging it within the context of the novel?

RP: Well, the thing about that is, if you were writing about New York at that time, which I was, there's no way that you can't acknowledge that. It's like writing about Hawaii in January 1942 without acknowledging Pearl Harbor. But I think it's important to preserve what you were writing before 9/11, because life I mean, people's first reaction on 9/12 was what they were doing on 9/10 was utterly insignificant in the face of what happened on 9/11. People needed a while to come back to themselves and not feel like everything they were doing was ridiculous simply because it wasn't embracing massive world issues. So I think it's very important to preserve your life, and what was important to you before that. Because if you don't, it's like they won twice, they've managed to make you feel meaningless.

The trick is, you need to acknowledge it, but I didn't feel like I wanted it to take over at all. Because that would repudiate everything in my life before 9/11, and what was important before 9/11 is still important now.

CP: Speaking of which, you co-wrote a very moving impressionistic piece, "Word on the Street," about 9/11 with your daughter, Anne, then a junior in high school, for The New York Times Magazine; it was subsequently anthologized in The Best American Essays 2002. How did the collaborative process come about?

RP: It came about without us even knowing it, and it came about blindingly fast. What had happened was, in the few weeks after 9/11, her school kept getting bomb threats. And you know, every kid there is terrified, everybody was totally freaked all the time. On top of that, every day they were practicing evacuation drills. It was like, in the '50s, you know how everybody was scared of the Russians, the threat of the atom bomb? But on 9/11, we did get fucking bombed! It wasn't the atom bomb, but it was it did happen. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't happen, everything was defined in the Cold War by what almost happened. This actually happened, and that's the big difference.

So here you got a kid who's like 16 years old, freaked out like everybody else, and every other day before she can take the first bite out of her sandwich in the cafeteria [imitates school air raid bells], "OK, everybody line up, go to your assigned evacuation spots." So the freak-out just mounts, and mounts, and it becomes like a way of life. And I'm writing my post-9/11 observances, I'm hopping into cabs with Islamic cab drivers, and going to Madison Square Garden, going to Rikers Island, just writing, and I'm talking to her about it, and I say, "What does it feel like to you?" and she just describes this whole day, this is what it feels like, and she says it so succinctly. It's a point of view that I don't have, because this is what it's like being a kid, and she painted such a perfect picture. As she's saying it, I'm writing it down, and she says, "I wish there was some way I could tell you this." I say, "You are telling me this," but she says she can make it more concrete, the way that her and her classmates' identities have completely changed as kids. And she just grabbed the pen, wrote two pages and walked out of the room. And verbatim, I put it in the essay. It's like she had the news.

CP: Now that Samaritan is finished, do you have anything in the works?

RP: I'm doing a script with Jonathan Demme, an original idea that I had. And I'm supposed to do the screenplay for Samaritan, but I don't know what's gonna happen with that.

Richard Price reads Thu., Jan. 16, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there




	search citypaper.net