Clockers.

CLOCKERS arrives with a press kit, a cardboard folder that might have held silk stockings; raises on its first page a non-literary matter: agent Lynn Nesbit's legs, "the best," says Liz Smith, "in the literary business." Then you learn how much Richard Price likes toughness, and how much Martin Scorsese paid him for the screen rights. Got it straight: this is a self-consciously hard-driving guy who nonetheless, in an earlier novel, could write something as awkwardly delicate as "Everything still had that post-rain placental shimmer to it, enhanced by the deepening slant of the late afternoon sun."

Mr. Price is not averse to patches of purple, even in Clockers, a long novel in which he seeks to probe the soft core of certain tough guys; what Mr. Price needs is an appropriate language that would let him reveal the pathos, poignancy, the distortions of ingrown tenderness, and without sentimentality. In other words, he needs to do the job without such cliches as the drug dealer who goes straight and the disaffected cop whose sense of mission is restored. Because his touch is didactic, Mr. Price does not pull it off--he is too simplistic an explainer --but he does draw a gritty and believable picture of his milieu, in this case a futureless dump called Dempsy, N.J.

Someone once asked me, as people do ask, where to go for material to write about, and I answered, "Go to those who have no hope." Mr. Price did that, much as he did earlier in The Wanderers (1974), plunging himself into the world of New Jersey crack dens (whereas for The Wanderers he had to do no such research; he had come from the Bronx housing project he wrote about). Clockers evinces his courage and his slithering empathy, and anyone wanting an in-depth vision of America Narcotica need look no farther than his novel.

Mr. Price knows both his dealers and his cops, although he tends to look at them with an almost morality-play simplicity; he knows what they stand for more than he understands them, and he rarely, as a novelist should, sweeps us into the dankest, most miserable crannies of his people, speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves. In other words, he takes no chances and so achieves a middling realism rather than a devastating vision.

His two main characters, Strike Dunham, a black 19-year.-old crack dealer with an ulcer, and Rocco Klein, an almost burnt-out case of a homicide cop, suck a lot of energy from Mr. Price and between them create a forcefield in which the lives of almost everyone can plausibly go awry. Strike's boss is a niggling psychotic millionaire. Someone bumps off one of the boss's people and Victor, Strike's good-guy brother, confesses to the crime. At this point, Rocco Klein begins to take a developed interest in Strike, convinced that Victor is covering for him; so he frames Strike as a stoolie and hangs him out to dry. In the end, when Klein's baby vanishes and the hitman after Strike dwindles away with AIDS, Strike turns to the now thoroughly animated cop for help.

It's a neat enough contraption, onethird misery, one-third bristling dialogue, one-third homily. In his bald, movie-oriented way, Mr. Price is as dogmatic as E.M. Forster. Strike thrives on power and status, Klein on risk and glamor. My problem with them is that, without an Al Pacino and a Paul Newman to flesh them out, I wonder if readers will remember them. Already they are fading from my own memory, and I begin to suspect they are only temporary, proxy types occupying space for another art form whose lights blaze brighter than fiction's. Written words are not this fable's final resting place in spite of its streamlined teacherly fiber, the density of its research, the street-smart twitch that never quits.

In one of its least humdrum efforts, C-SPAN recently set up cameras next to a line of outdoor barbers in a Hanoi street and filmed whatever happened: a kind of hands-off mass reportage that made the idea of Hanoi solid and casual. It did the same for a backwater street in a Hanoi suburb, allowing whole minutes of no action, no movement at all. Mr. Price does something similar for Dempsy, reminding us that his skill is not literary at all, but optical, clerical, anecdotal. He's more like Frank Norris with a degree in labor relations. What he really needs is a TV show.