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 is Despie," says Buddy Borsalino, introducing to the Wanderers a girl whose "Juicy Fruit breath" has just begun to "intoxicate him." "Despie … this is the guys."). We haven't yet discovered that if Mr. Price's characters are pitched in a violent key—if they talk with their fists and dream of little else but treating their "seemingly incurable virginity"—their violence masks tenderness as well as brutality….

And it hasn't yet dawned on us that if Mr. Price's exaggerations are occasionally contrived, then just as often they ascend to a surrealism that justifies them entirely—as for instance when that playground football game is broken up by a horde of Irish Catholic "midgets" called the Ducky Boys, and there follows a glorious melee so bloody and brutal, so flashing with tire chains, car aerials and straight razors, and yet so comparatively harmless in its physical consequences, that it can only be read as a sort of poem of violence.

And once we get used to Mr. Price's world, we believe it….

Indeed, so accustomed do we become to the violence and obscenity of Mr. Price's world that any act short of outright murder assumes a quality of near-Chekhovian understatement. What had first seemed to be gratuitous brutality begins to impress us as a metaphor signifying the vitality of lower-class life. And so we find ourselves feeling gently nostalgic when the Wanderers take Buddy out for his final bachelor fling and present him with a going-away gift of "400 foil-wrapped Trojans." And when musclebound Emilio accepts the news of his son's departure from home without hitting him in the stomach or bloodying his nose, it seems nothing less than a scene of gentle blessing.

In the end the Wanderers take their separate paths out of innocent youth onto the treadmill of adulthood—some by way of marriage, others by way of the services. Eugene Caputo, after standing helplessly by while his girl friend is raped by a black man wielding a razor, decides to join the Marines in order to absorb his mother's admonition "that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you." The final measure of Richard Price's accomplishment in writing "The Wanderers" is that, after all we've been put through, we can read this warning to be meant ironically.