PLAYBOY: Lush Life can be viewed as a novel of property relations, but perhaps it is about a greater topic: change. None of the characters can prevent it, no matter how hard they try. They are all fallible in their efforts to stop time, to keep things static. It's almost like McTeague. Is there a fatalism, a determinism, at work here?

PRICE: Real estate is the most effective crime-fighting force in the world. Nothing can stop it -- especially in terms of the Lower East Side. The two biggest crime-fighting things that changed the Lower East Side into the new La Bohème playground are (1) Giuliani taking over and saying that anybody so much as lights up a menthol cigarette below Houston Street, lock them up. And (2) real estate, needing an outlet. I think of the Lower East Side as real estate flowing like lava north to south. And it's just been creeping. Houston is the northern border to the Lower East Side. When you get closer to Canal Street, to the southern parts of Orchard, you see less evidence. More of the bistro-type places are outposts. The real estate has to catch up to the bistro that's already down there waiting for it. That's where you'll find whatever is left that's unrehabbed or unconverted. It just goes down from Houston to Canal. It takes a couple of years to get all the way down there, but it's inevitable. Once it takes off, once word gets out, it becomes mindless. Not meaning that there isn't will and determination behind it, but mindless like a force of nature. I saw it as the people coming in as lava and people who had been there for 50 years as bewildered villagers right under Mount Etna. You know: Here it comes!

PRICE: People bump into people that they don't know what to do with. Like, Where did you come from? On both sides. It's like when worlds collide. You have the people who have been living in the projects forever. You have the Puerto Ricans and blacks living down there since at least World War II. And here come the MFAs, you know, the 25-year-old laptoppers, and they're oblivious to each other. It's not like they growl at each other. They're just not aware of each other's existence. They pass like vapor. They don't see each other unless it's three o'clock in the morning and somebody's looking for 20 bucks to buy Chinese takeout and they decide to go inland and throw a gun in somebody's face and get some Chinese food. The guy getting mugged has never had a gun put in his face before. He has no idea where he is. And maybe he's loaded, bozo'd, and he thinks he's in a movie. And so he says a movie line and the guy with the gun says, "What the fuck? Doesn't this guy know what a gun is?" You know, and he's got three women standing behind him. So what do you do? And the shit happens and you get headlines for five days. Once that filters out, everybody goes back to their separate kingdoms.

PLAYBOY: I notice a lot of people acting like they're in a movie.

PRICE: It's like the people down there don't know where they are. You're oblivious to the world. The world is kind of about you. You're privileged, or you might come from a privileged background. The world is your playground. Hard-core reality hasn't set in yet. Being a waiter is just sort of playing at being working class or something. It's not the end of your life. It's a means to an end. The end is that some day you're going to be some kind of supernova. You know, an entrepreneur, artist, whatever. And it's a wonderful life. It's all a game or something.

PLAYBOY: What's the derivation of the title? Was there a Billy Strayhorn connection?

PRICE: I kind of blew it. I was aware of Billy Strayhorn and the song "Lush Life." I never looked at the lyrics, but I thought what it meant was abundance -- lush as in abundant. I didn't realize it was about a bunch of midday drunks. But I still like the title.

PLAYBOY: What about cops? What's your fascination with them?

PRICE: I don't want to write about myself too literally. Whoever's eyes you choose to write through, you're really writing about yourself. Autobiography seeps into whatever you write. And I can't imagine being a cop. Somehow if I make the main character a cop, it gives me enough distance to see whatever I want to see. I have to make this guy something other than me, so I can lose all my self-consciousness about his consciousness. The other thing about cops is that the stuff you see when you're with them is stuff you would never ever see otherwise. Hanging out with police, or being with them when they respond to things, it's like seeing human behavior in such extremis. A cop is a backstage pass to urban life. But I don't have a thing for cops. I'm not a buff. Politically, I'm not law and order any more than I'm an anarchist.