A Voice of the Streets : CLOCKERS, <i> By Richard Price (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95; 599 pp.)</i>

I loved Richard Price’s early novels, but if I were on a quiz show and called upon to relate their plots, I would leave with only a home version of the game.

The plots hardly mattered in those deeply felt novels--”The Wanderers” (1974), “Bloodbrothers” (1976) and most especially “Ladies’ Man” (1978). What lingered in the memory was dialogue so pulsing and rhythmic that a page could leave you breathless. Price skillfully used street talk, drawn mostly from a youth spent in the Bronx projects, to conjure up a pack of characters driven by their hormones, a dire need for respect and an eternal confusion about their places in the world.

But he was more than a word wizard. The talk and the characters were so engrossing you hardly noticed he was carefully laying the groundwork for explosive scenes.

It’s those scenes that lasted the longest in the memory. Sometimes violent, sometimes only a quiet bit of talk in a restaurant, they hit home with painful revelations about the failed promises of “adult” life.

The early novels were just about all we had from Price in the way of books. He wrote one more (the failed “The Breaks” in 1983) and then Hollywood called. With his ability to spin out dialogue he was a natural for the movies, but he could hardly be accused of slipping into schlock. His credits, so far, are “The Color of Money,” “Sea of Love” and the Martin Scorsese episode of “New York Stories.”

The movies were far less personal statements than his books, however, and those who were taken by Price’s novels about the confused 1970s wondered what he would do with the 1990s.

The answer is “Clockers,” a massive new novel centered around the drug trade at a housing project in suburban New Jersey, just across the river from New York City. The book has already been sold for a high price to the movies, but “Clockers” is not a sellout book in search of a quick Hollywood turnaround. If not totally successful, it’s still a serious attempt to meld the wild energy of Price’s youth with a more structured narrative.

“Clockers” is the street term for cocaine dealers, although Price never explains why they are called that. He has said in interviews that he did extensive research, hanging out for weeks with the dealers and the police to get the street-talk right. I have no idea if he succeeded in making it authentic, but it sure does seem so.

The author has lost none of his ability to fill a book with vibrant talk, almost to a fault. After several hundred pages you start wondering if any dealer or cop ever had a conversation not peppered by slang, street philosophy or rhythmic inflections.

The two main characters are Strike, a black, lower-middle-rank dealer in his early 20s, and Rocco, a white, middle-aged homicide detective. Both feel they are expert at what they do, but like Price’s usual characters (and Chekhov’s before them), they find their current professions wanting and constantly fantasize about remaking themselves.

Price is one for two on these characters. Rocco is the more familiar to him--he could be one of the Wanderers gang grown up and gone straight--and by far the more successful in a literary sense. Rocco seems lost between the crude world of his fellow officers, many of whom are on the take, and the hopelessly trivial lives of the yuppie friends of his far younger wife. Rocco pins his hopes for deliverance on a hot young actor who is tagging along with him at work to research an upcoming police-detective role. Rocco prays that the actor will take a liking to him and somehow get him into the movies.

Strike, who also is warring with his everyday world, has fantasy schemes, too, and they are just about as likely to come true as Rocco’s. But Price does not quite get inside Strike.

When Rocco makes a foolish, offbeat move in his life, it seems perfectly understandable. When Strike makes a similar move, it often seems arbitrary and self-destructive. Strike, like Price, grew up in the projects, but perhaps because the character is black and the author white, the experiences they shared do not seem quite transferable. Price may get the talk right, but the soul of a man who grew up under such a different and more profound set of oppressions is finally unknowable to him.

Price does pull off a few spectacular passages concerning Strike as well as Rocco, mostly having to do with the children in their lives (since the early novels, Price has gotten married and now has two daughters). The sequence that hits home the hardest is about a smart, quiet boy in the projects. In a paternal mood, Strike takes the boy into New York to treat him to a haircut. While they are there, a sidewalk preacher strides into the shop to talk about the evils destroying the lives of young black people. Strike, who is basically conservative in his beliefs and does not take any drugs or alcohol, finds himself agreeing with the preacher and never recognizing himself as part of the problem.

It’s Price at his best--pointing out the contrast between a character’s real and fantasy life in a completely convincing and heartbreaking manner.

Rocco and Strike are brought together when Strike’s straight-arrow brother, Victor, confesses to the shooting murder of a drug- dealer. Neither Rocco nor Strike believe Victor actually committed the crime.

Price does not take the easy way out and make this a buddy book, however. Rocco’s and Strike’s searches for the truth are separate and at odds; indeed, Rocco believes that Strike is the actual murderer, and he sets out to make his life a nightmare.

“Clockers” does have a strong plot line and the mystery does keep the pages turning during the slower parts of the huge book, but in the end the story is the weakest element of the novel. The resolution of the mystery is particularly unsatisfying, failing to underscore Price’s theme on the difficulty of anyone, policeman or drug-dealer, turning his life around.

It’s good having Price back as a novelist, but here’s hoping that in the near future he tackles a subject matter that is closer to home, that doesn’t require much more research than the life he has already led. It would be great to see what he could do, for example, with the movie business.