At first it looks as if Richard Price is contriving extreme effects for their own sake in his first novel, "The Wanderers"…. By the end of the second story we have been treated not only to a torrent of street language that can't be sampled here and a swamp of sexual byplay that can't be described, but also to one aborted race war, one gang skirmish complete with Molotov cocktails and a scene in which two preteen-agers are threatened with mutilation of their genitals. Mr. Price is never one to underplay his scenes….

Still, it pays to keep reading "The Wanderers." For if Mr. Price's exaggerations seem troublesome at first, it is only because we haven't yet adjusted to the world in which they occur. We haven't yet appreciated the authenticity of his dialogue, which establishes itself only through its cumulative repetition of flat grammatical contortions ("Hey, this...