May 19, 1998

The Birth of a Novel: 'Freedomland' by Richard Price

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    NEW YORK -- When Richard Price took off for Union, S.C., four years ago to join the media mob following the Susan Smith child abduction case, he wasn't quite sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn't going to find all of it south of the Mason-Dixon line.

    "When you write, your location is always your third character, and I prefer to know my third character like the back of my hand," said Price, the street-smart chronicler of the inner-city blues whose new novel, "Freedomland," takes the germ of Smith's lurid lie that a black carjacker abducted her two sons and transplants it to the battered projects of urban New Jersey.

    "If I'd grown up in Union, you better believe this book would be about Union. If I grew up on a prairie, this book would have taken place on a prairie. You know, a gopher did it. Even if you hate where you came from, it's where you came from, and it informs you. It's sort of the ZIP code for your heart."

    Few writers know their own ZIP code so well and plumb it quite so insistently as Price. Indeed, he sets the story of Smith, who is serving a life sentence for the 1994 drowning death of her two sons, in Dempsey, N.J., the fictional town where "Clockers," his portrait of the crack trade, took place.

    Now 48, Price talks in the rapid-fire overdrive of his novels and screenplays. He said he had barely followed the Smith case until the announcement that she had been arrested for her sons' murders exploded in his head. He hopped on a plane to Charlotte and drove to Union with no agenda but a visceral fascination with the story. He came away with two thoughts -- as germane to Union, N.J., as to Union, S.C. -- that led to his novel.

    "The first thing was that America is like a big gun and there are a lot of triggers," said Price, who was wearing an Edward Gorey T-shirt and blue jeans and whose floppy hair and brisk manner suggest the actor Al Pacino.

    "And one of the triggers you can pull is that a black guy did it. You know that gun is going to go off. That barrel is not going to jam."

    The second thought, he said, was about the way people's lives play out in an accretion of small events -- intimate, subtle, positive, pernicious -- a series of clicks and clacks that can congeal in one revelatory moment that forever changes everything.

    "I wanted to try to balance the intricacies of a life that lead to one act and the chain reaction of explosions that come from that act," he said. "It's like you're juggling a feather and a bowling ball. The feather is all the subtleties and small plans, and the bowling ball is kaboom, she did it."

    Price in South Carolina has the mismatched quality of Shaquille O'Neal as Kentucky Derby jockey. He said he'd never been South until 1979, when Playboy sent him to interview the University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. In the reverse of stereotypical urban paranoia, he envisioned a world of Klansmen and freedom riders, got nervous when he saw three white guys walking toward him and asked a baffled and offended Bryant if he ever got nervous living "down South."

    Price grew up in a housing project in the Bronx, the son of a freelance window dresser. His life wasn't the Sharks and Jets. ("I was a member of the Goldberg Gang," he once said. "We walked down the street doing algebra.") But his upbringing did imprint the New York streets on his soul to the point that most of his novels and screenplays play out in a murky, half-lighted urban world of thugs, dirtballs, hustlers, cops, wise guys and knuckleheads of varying ethnicity and on both sides of the law.

    "Freedomland" is a look at race (what he calls "The American Flu") told through the prism of three people: Brenda Martin, a white woman who works in Dempsey's Armstrong housing project and reports the abduction of her son; Jesse Haus, an ambitious but decent white newspaper reporter; and Lorenzo Council, a savvy, empathetic black cop.

    It's a world, he says, in which people, even with the best of intentions, still fumble and bumble when they enter the no man's land of race. And he said it is informed in huge part by his background growing up in an integrated housing project, a place he figures was "about as mixed at it's ever going to be on this planet."

    The book's name comes from the short-lived American history amusement park that was built in the shape of the United States in the early 1960s in the Bronx, where Co-Op City is now. The book's locales include a place called Freedomtown, a stripped-down version of the original that he says is like "an imitation of an imitation of American history, like America in your pocket."

    He said the book was at best a small, ineffectual model for bridging the racial divide, but if there's an agenda to his book beyond telling a story, that's it.

    "The whole issue of race has become so surly, it's like the Union versus the Confederates with each group holding up its victims and shaking them like placards," he said. " 'Gavin Cato,' 'Oh yeah? Yankel Rosenbaum,' 'Yusuf Hawkins,' 'Oh yeah? Central Park jogger.' It's like throwing mud with all hope abandoned. I wanted to create people who wind up tripping all over themselves because they have unexpected empathy for the other. I just wanted to do a story where people cannot hold to their sides.

    "I don't have a political statement. I only have the trajectory of my characters and how they respond to things. But I figure: Is there racial injustice? Yes. Is there a double standard? Yes. Is there anything more that can be legislated? I think not. That's been over since the '60s. Right now, it's all hearts and minds. So let's talk about hearts and minds."

    If the book was an attempt to bridge different worlds, his life has much the same quality. An enormously successful screenwriter as well as novelist, Price leads the life of an A-list Manhattan literary celebrity.

    He says if it were up to him he'd still be living in a cinder-block dormitory with W.C. Fields posters on the wall. But his four-story Gramercy Park town house, with its dappled walls, geometric watercolors, Coney Island fun house mirror, elegant stainless steel kitchen, sunlit garden and bathroom with its wry, underwater painting is like a dream of hip urban affluence. He lives there with his wife and two daughters. Price, who battled his own drug demons in the past, often takes research trips to the projects. He said he's comfortable shuttling between the two worlds and enough of a creature of the city not to meditate too much on its current identity and contradictions.

    "The body count is down," he said, "I don't know how important that is for the quality of life on a daily basis. But there are 17 different New Yorks. Are we talking the Martin Scorsese New York? The Woody Allen New York? My New York? Spike Lee's New York? Whit Stillman's New York? Louis Auchincloss' New York? Jay McInerney's New York? The thing about New York is you can never get used to it. You go three blocks from wherever you are, and you're in a different galaxy."

    Price is preparing for his book tour, then will go back to writing screenplays until his next novel begins to gestate -- one more feather and bowling ball to juggle.

    "Writing a screenplay is a job. It's not like writing a novel, where allegedly you're not writing to please anybody. The whole point of writing a screenplay is to please people. It's all about making people feel jazzed enough to write the big check to make the movie, getting actors psyched enough to overcome their anxiety about looking like fools, getting the director to feel it's a compelling enough story to give up two year's of their life. So that's why everyone says they love everything and they ask you to change everything.

    "Wonderful means change it. Fantastic means change it. Terrific means change it. Thank you means you're fired."



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