No matter how shiny and safe a city gets, no matter how high its housing prices climb, how fast its crime rates fall and how many of its corner stores are turned into buzz-before-entering boutiques dedicated to clothing the “urban baby” or are replaced by franchised coffee shops with WiFi hot spots for laptop-toting Beat poets, there is one sort of room at the city’s very core whose design schemes rarely shift upscale and whose typical occupants — be they real or fictional — resist much gentrification of the soul, let alone beautification of the hair. The walls of such rooms are dull, their lights are harsh, and hunkered down in most of them are a jittery suspect and two clever cops, one of whom tends to act hostile and volatile, the other one solicitous and calm. Over this trio hangs a plain round clock.

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LUSH LIFE

By Richard Price.

455 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

Related

First Chapter: ?Lush Life? (March 16, 2008)

Books: Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium (March 2, 2008)

'Lush Life,' by Richard Price: A Kaleidoscopic Perspective on a Murder, and Dreams Lost and Found (March 4, 2008)

Times Topics: Richard Price

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Damon Winter/The New York Times

Sometimes the hands move slowly, sometimes swiftly, but when they’re controlled by a serious storyteller, they always tell the same time: too late, too late. That’s the lesson of these ugly pens. A case may be cracked and the motives behind it exposed, but the greater mysteries always go unsolved: what good are answers when what’s done is done and something just like it, or worse, will happen tomorrow?

In “Lush Life,” Richard Price’s eighth novel, the resurfacing project that caps the same old potholes (and threatens to collapse in certain areas, potentially creating immense new craters capable of swallowing small crowds) targets the tangled, once tenement-lined streets of New York City’s Lower East Side. In Realtor-speak, the district is “in transition,” which means in Police Department terms that its college-educated young renting class and bonus-gorged co-op-owning elite can still score narcotics from the old-guard locals, whose complexions are generally darker than the new folks’, making them easy to spot on party nights but tricky to ID in photo lineups come the red-eyed mornings after. Keeping such bloody collisions of class and color to an acceptably inconspicuous minimum is the job of the so-called quality-of-life squads that Price — a consummate stalker-realist who seems to have written the book from stoops and doorways; his gaze is that pathologically focused, his ear that tuned — portrays as a nincompoop nouvelle constabulary whose stakeouts are so light on lock-and-load moments they’d put even the Hardy Boys to sleep. Down on newly hip Orchard and Eldridge Streets, among the exclusive no-signage clubs and Zagat-rated fusion eateries, what was once an authentic urban jungle has almost themed itself out of existence, turning a lot of the cops into park rangers.

But once in a while the cooped-up cats still pounce, tempted by so much slow-moving, pampered prey, all sodden with money and novelty martinis. The lights go on in Price’s interrogation room after just such an ambush.

The victim — the one who lives — is Eric Cash, in his own mind an emerging writer but known to the world as a veteran restaurant manager. In his mid-30s, the descendant of Jewish ghetto-dwellers who lived and died on the same city blocks where Eric is riding out his undiscovered phase along with 20,000 other tip-dependent would-be screenwriters, he heads out one night with two pals into the Disneyhood and suddenly finds himself in Scorceseland. A gun comes out, a brown finger on its trigger, and the next thing Eric knows he’s in the ugly room recounting the mugging and murder of his friend Ike to a female officer, Yolanda, and a more traditionally male and Irish fellow, Matty Clark. Eric thinks he’s a witness but really he’s a suspect, and Price provides the taut, triangular dialogue, which at first sounds a bit like standard noir talk (Price writes for the cable crime drama “The Wire”) but soon grows bushier, thornier and taller in a way the screen can’t quite contain because of its horizontal orientation but which fits with the verticality of the page and sometimes, as the book goes on, climbs clean off it and up into the sky.

Here’s a restaurant owner, Eric’s boss, griping about the hypersensitive neighbors who’ve been bugging him to keep the noise down or risk the cancellation of his liquor license. “The whites. The, the ‘pioneers. ... The Latinos? The Chinese? The ones been living here since the Flood? Couldn’t be nicer. Happy for the jobs. The thing is, the complainers? They’re the ones that started all this. We just follow them. Always have, always will. Come down here, buy some smack squat from the city, do a little fix-up, have a nice big studio, rent out the extra space, mix it up with the ethnics, feel all good and politically righteous about yourself. But those lofts now? Those buildings? Twenty-five hundred square feet, fourth floor, no elevator, Orchard and Broome. Two point four mil just last week.”

If fiction writing were a fairer profession, the price of such hearing would be blindness, but the hell of it is that Price can also see — even in the dark and at great distances — and not only with his ordinary two eyes but with a wider, clearer third one that’s set between them and an inch above them. “The Clara E. Lemlich Houses were a grubby sprawl of 50-year-old high-rises sandwiched between two centuries. To the west, the 14-story buildings were towered over by One Police Plaza and Verizon headquarters, massive futuristic structures without any distinguishing features other than their blind climbing endlessness.”

Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price’s skull, as well he should be, given such gloomy doings, but in the enormous, cross-sensory architecture of the last three words above, one detects Saul Bellow’s vision, too. Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the Masonic keystone of his novel is a box-shaped N.Y.P.D. office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn’t just present a slice of life, he piles life high and deep. Time too. The past is rendered mostly as an absence, though, as a set of caverns, a hive of catacombs. Some of his characters’ ancestors are down there, but the main way we know this is through the hollowness of the new neighborhood built over their crypts.

What a catch: How a girl called Laura Haddock is becoming a very big fish indeed

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She already has one of the most memorable names in show business, and Laura Haddock looks set to be among the emergent stars of 2008.

Growing up in Hertfordshire, she decided to be an actress at six after seeing Hayley Mills in the film Pollyanna. She left school at 17, moved to London to study drama and started performing in plays by Shakespeare and Mike Leigh.

Her TV break came last year with the sitcom pilot Comedy Showcase: Plus One.

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Since then she has played Amanda Redman's daughter Kacie in the ITV1 comedy drama Honest and will soon be appearing in Sky One's adaptation of Terry Pratchett's The Colour Of Magic with David Jason and Christopher Lee.

Now 22, she shares a flat in West London with her sister. For the past two years she has been dating singer-songwriter Tom Dibb.

I'd much rather be a Haddock than a Sardine or a Halibut. It first dawned on me that I had a comical surname when someone called me "Fishface" on my first day at school. I've heard all the fish jokes since then, many times over. When I started acting professionally, I considered changing my name, but my dad looked so disappointed that I decided to keep it. I've grown to love it now.

David Jason is nothing like Del Boy. The weirdest feeling in the world is to wake up and think, "Today I'm filming scenes with David Jason." I grew up watching Only Fools And Horses and he's a big hero of mine. So, on the first day of shooting The Colour Of Magic I was both fantastically excited and very, very nervous. He turned out to be completely grounded and extremely well spoken. Not like Del Boy at all.

I'm a fabulous drunk. I'm always the first person up on the table having a dance, going bonkers. I can be at the centre of a party even when there is no party.

I have no problem doing sex scenes. As long as they're funny it's fine. There were three of them in the first series of Honest. Because it's a comedy-drama, the scenes were more like light-hearted romps than anything emotionally intense. Even so, I dreaded the thought of my parents seeing them. I had to blindfold them while it was on.

The most uncomfortable hour of my life was spent sitting on a block of ice. I had to play a mermaid in Honest and I forced myself to imagine I was sitting on a sunny beach, praying that my backside wouldn't drop off from the freezing cold.

I was once so desperate for attention I faked my own death. Well, sort of. When I was growing up, if the conversation wasn't focused entirely on me I'd often fall off my chair and pretend to be choking on a chicken bone or something. After a while, my parents accepted it as completely normal.

My boyfriend wants me to marry Jay Kay. I'm a huge fan of Jamiroquai and if he proposed there's no way I could resist. I've told my boyfriend this and he's completely cool with it. His attitude is, "How great would it be if my girlfriend was married to Jay Kay?" He's very understanding like that.

Bluffing is key to being a successful actor. It's mostly about convincing somebody that it's within your capabilities to do something even if you've never tried it. If a casting director needed someone who is good at judo, I wouldn't pretend I was a black belt but I'd tell them it was within my grasp. That's called bluffing, not lying.

Life wouldn't be worth living without my MacBook Pro, my BlackBerry, my iPod and Bose SoundDock. Not forgetting the huge Sony television that dominates my lounge. I picked up the gadget bug from my dad. He's the king of all things new-fangled.

The first thing I'd do with a big pay cheque is buy a fleet of Fifties Chevrolets, one for every day of the month. They're the coolest cars ever. I'd also buy a massive open-plan artist's studio in London and fill it with soft, squeezy furniture, a home cinema, a waterbed and one of those Japanese paperless toilets. If there was a few bob left over, I'd treat my dad to a super-fast speedboat.

I'll happily entertain strangers while demonstrating a challenging yoga position. I take after my mum like that. I'm an odd mix ? my sensible, determined side comes from my father who was a corporate financier. The other side comes from my mum who used to sing in a folk group called The Harvesters. She's a complete nutcase.

I'm proud to be a Haddock but I never eat the stuff. When I was growing up, mum suddenly announced no more haddock would be served at the Haddock table. We couldn't be seen to be eating our own.

• 'The Colour Of Magic' screens on Sky One, March 22 and March 23. The Honest DVD boxset is out now.