With more than 150,000 copies hitting bookstores, Richard Price's latest novel, Samaritan, is sure to sit in high piles on the new fiction hardcover tables at bookstores across the country. His third book set in the fictionalized New Jersey slumscape of Dempsey (after Clockers and Freedomland), Samaritan follows along like a camera as aging detective Nerese Ammons pieces together the story behind how part-time writing teacher and scriptwriter Ray ended up in a hospital ward with half his head smashed (from his own vase, no less). Ray knows his attacker, but won't tell.

More a psychological than literal drama, Samaritan pulls back each layer of motive until it reveals the raw emotions behind each player's behavior. Though critics have found the book slow (ours said "the questions will hold readers' interest but not seize it"), many of the long talky stretches during which characters try their best to explain who they are to each other are mesmerizing.

The very quotable Price spoke with PW Daily about the art of dialogue and what it is he does during all those years between writing novels (hint: he's a screenwriter...):

PWD: There's a lot of dialogue in this book. Is it what interests you most about writing?

RP: I just let people cut loose -- if I could get away with it, I'd do a book that's all dialogue. I find for myself that I feel freest when letting people talk. When I'm working descriptions, it's like working with a toothpick on marble. I love writing dialogue. It's effortless for me.

PWD: Is that why you were drawn to writing screenplays?

RP: People think I'm a natural for screenplays because I have a good ear, but screenplays are really about structure. If you can write authentic or witty dialogue, that's a plus, but it's not essential. On paper, dialogue is not what they're working for...and then they're looking for momentum. I write screenplays basically to finance my novels. My name is on it, and it's going to be the best I can write, but if I didn't have novels to go to, I think I would have jumped off a building 20 years ago. What you learn very quickly in Hollywood is that the director is the author of a movie, not the screenwriter.

PWD: Violence or implied violence has a big role in your stories, but why do you think it plays such a central role in today's television, movies, and even books?

RP: I don't see my books as being that violent. The people in that world live in dire straits economically and spiritually -- there's usually one violent incident and then people talking each other to death. The way life works to my experience is 99% boredom and 1% sudden terror. It's like combat. I like to keep things small because life is small. People live in a situation where the price for a mistake is higher than in a more secure world -- people's reaction are so much more exaggerated. There's no room for humor and flexibility. Samaritan is less of that world than Clockers and Freedomland .

PWD: Yet so much more of the main character, Ray, seems based on you.

RP: There's more me in it, but I'm not particularly like that -- it's more about the intersection of my world and that world. I grew up in a housing project. Here it is, what? 3074 and I'm 53 years old and Samaritan takes place in the same god damn housing project. You can go to many places in your life and you're from many places and that housing project is always where I gravitate to. I can't write anything that my impulses don't tell me to write. If I tried to write about Elizabethan England or ancient Greece, I'm a dead man. It always has to come from inside yourself.

PWD: Do you write selfishly then?

RP: It's like chaos theory. You lead your life and it's not particularly exciting, so you want to read or write something that'll take you somewhere. Some people like to read about themselves and read John Cheever and Updike and get off on the self recognition. Other people want to leave this planet. It depends on what you want to do by reading. I don't try to write for anybody: not for the movies, not for people who are buying books. I just get caught up in whatever I think is the moment. I become obsessed with getting whatever I have to get right, really right. I gotta know what the parameters of truth are so I can make responsible fiction. If I'm writing about crack, then I really have to learn to make crack. If I'm writing about lawyers, I really want lawyers who read it to be riveted. At this point, I think what people expect -- I hate that word "gritty" -- but people expect jam-packed social realism. I just want it to ring true.

PWD: The title of the book would also imply there is a social or moral message in the book.

RP: I've never been able to summarize what the book is, but what I can say is Samaritan is not a parable, it's about purging ego from altruism. The sin of the character in Samaritan is that as much as he wants to be a good man, he wants to be acknowledged as a good man. Someone without a lot of money comes to the place of his birth, which is impoverished, and tries to help everyone out, teaching pro-bono at a public school. Somebody nearly caves in his skull. But he feels so much shame that he won't seek justice because the truth would be most mortifying to him. The mystery is as much about the social terrain as the story. This book isn't about the good Samaritan. This is more about the dumb Samaritan , the half wit.

PWD: Is it possible for a reader to learn from your fiction and do something more than simply be a voyeur?

RP: If there's a public service that comes out of fiction, you can take facts that are elusive, but what a fiction writer can do is essentialize and speed up reality. You're running that yellow maker though things and highlighting them to draw people's attention. Things go on that are so invisible and amorphous. What you do is extract the gold from the rocks.