The Bad in Goodness

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Richard Price grew up in a housing project in the Bronx. He lives now with his wife and two teenage daughters in a fancy-funky town house off Gramercy Park in Manhattan, the kind of place you head for after you make a few million as a novelist and screenwriter. The author of Clockers and Freedomland — lush, knowing, best-selling books about struggle and redemption in the projects — has been up in that high-priced league for more than a decade. Which means that in the eyes of the world, he suffers from a variation of the Bruce Springsteen Problem. You can't help wanting a guy who knows the streets that well to live in the hood.

As it turns out, the hood still lives in him. It's not just the enduring music of the Bronx in his voice (or in his jumpy cadences — when he's on a tear, he's got faster delivery than FedEx). It's the nervy edge of his judgments. Try reminding him that some people think the novel is dead. "What does that mean, the novel's dead?" He gives you a funny look. "The novel will show up at your funeral."

If I can get Price's fine new book to be one of my pallbearers, I might be O.K. with that. The novel is alive because writers like Price are crafting books like Samaritan (Bloomsbury; 377 pages), about a guy who discovers the hard way what a complicated transaction charity can be. This is the third work that Price has set in Dempsy, his fictional New Jersey town of blue-collar strivers, scuttling young men on the make and always, always, the police. He discovered the book's themes in himself when he was doing the street research about cops and crack dealers for Clockers. In preparation for that book, he dropped into the lives of people — narcs, druglords, ghetto mothers — who opened up to him. He charmed them. He wowed their kids. He fed their news into his notebooks, then moved on. "I always felt like I was leaving people seduced and abandoned," he says.

Eventually, so does Ray Mitchell, the generous but by no means selfless man at the center of Samaritan. At 42, Ray is a successful TV writer who has turned his back on Hollywood and headed home to Jersey, to the housing project where he grew up and the daughter he hasn't seen much of. He volunteers to teach a writing class at his old high school. For Ray, self-appointed sunbeam is a role he warms to right away. Before long, he is recklessly lending big sums to near strangers and gathering twitchy characters under his wing. He's romancing the wife of a jailed drug dealer. Then somebody brains him with a vase in his apartment. Ray won't say who did it, not even to Nerese Ammons, the black police detective, single mother and childhood acquaintance who wants to get to the bottom of the crime. The bottom is dark and deep.

In Ray you find some of Price. They're both from high-rise public housing, which is where Price learned the urban folkways he mapped out in his 1974 debut novel, The Wanderers, that made him, at 24, Studs Lonigan for the generation that would adopt the Ramones. Over the next nine years, he published two formidable books and one that was not so formidable, and discovered cocaine. After a struggle, he put drugs aside. Concluding that he was tapped out for a while as a novelist, he, like Ray, shipped himself to Hollywood, where he made a fortune writing films like The Color of Money for Martin Scorsese and Sea of Love.

By the late '80s he was ready again for novels. For Clockers he spent months hanging with cops and dealers in housing projects around Jersey City, N.J., which is where he learned things like how to use an eggbeater to work lactose powder into cocaine. Critics were awed by his combination of psychological nuance and journalistic detail. "They made it sound like I was out there with a notepad and a pith helmet," he says. But he started to doubt his own virtues. Sometimes he would take a kid from the projects into Manhattan, where the boy would be dazzled into numb silence by the place. "After a while I thought of myself as a big Thanksgiving float," he says. "The wind shifts, it hits a light pole, something falls off and kills three people down below. Then the wind shifts again, and the float just drifts off down the street." Those doubts led to this wise book. For all the homework that went into Clockers, Price was never a dealer or a cop. But he has been what Ray is in Samaritan, an intruder in other people's lives. His fellow feeling with this character goes deep. What he knows about Ray you don't learn by researching the streets. Instead, you prowl your own heart. It's one more beat that Price knows how to walk with authority