It seems like some weird accident — at this late date, and given the fearless expressiveness of the community — that there’s been no really good novel about New York hipsters, the mass drawn from the junior ranks of the city’s creative industries and crammed into once-marginal neighborhoods throughout the city. This is rich material: There are the unlikely beards, sure, but there’s also the unusual fusion of earnestness and irony, the religious zeal about creativity and cool, and the bourgeois experiment in slumming, a self-conscious and self-assigned decline.

Richard Price’s new novel, “Lush Life” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 464 pages, $26), takes a glancing swing at all of this, but Mr. Price, a social novelist by instinct though a pulp genre writer by trade, is less concerned with the inner lives of hipsters than with their massed effects on the city, and the working-class cultures they borrow from and rub up against. Mr. Price’s plot is a murder mystery’s, but the illuminating, slow burn of the book is the aging hipster’s fear that his ambitions are not, themselves, distinguishing — not enough to save him from the grim, bottom-line determinism of his paycheck. Those actors waiting tables find themselves, in the end, most of them, waiting tables, and a hipster who moves into a gritty neighborhood in early gentrification is not guaranteed, in Mr. Price’s telling, to ascend into a local intellectual aristocracy. He may simply be joining the working classes.

Mr. Price has a vivid genius for detail and in “Lush Life,” he gets the atmosphere just about perfect. His protagonist, Eric Cash, is in his mid-30s, a shift manager at a successful restaurant and a man of only vague internal direction, who thinks of himself as a creative type, but whose summed output is four published short stories in 10 years, a role as “the lead in a basement theater production of The Dybbuk,” and a partly executed screenplay that’s “kind of like a ghost story. But not about ghost ghosts? More like, metaphorical ghosts.” His apartment is stuffed with research materials belonging to his ex-girlfriend, whose thesis involved pornography across cultures — “Southeast Asian sex tourist guides … titty magazines bristling with her hand-scrawled notations” — like taunts from a more exciting life. It is 2003 on the Lower East Side.

Cash is out one night with two younger hipsters, half-friends for whom he feels a mix of fraternity and contempt. They are returning home late when the others are shot; one, Ike Marcus, dies from his wounds. Cash tells the cops it was a mugging gone bad, but he can only vaguely and inconsistently recall details about the muggers, and police quickly begin to focus on him. Mr. Price omits any direct description of the shooting, which serves to preserve the mystery. To the reader, Cash himself seems like a pretty good bet for the crime: He’s got the middle-class murderer’s makeup, the hollow-eyed, frustrated ambition, the scattershot sneer, and the just-arrived conviction that his circumstances are unlikely to ever get better.

Mr. Price has got the feel of the fringes of the ghetto—banal-flecked with creepy — exactly right. When the cops walk into a Chinese immigrant’s apartment, men sleep on planks cut into the wall, and the decoration is one enormous carp, in a fishbowl so small it can’t turn around, one of them “thinking the poor thing must have lost its mind years ago.” When the cops return, the carp is gone: one night’s dinner.

Mr. Price won his reputation for this kind of precision in “Clockers” (1992), his terrific procedural novel about the crack trade in Jersey City. But that novel went some ways deeper than surface realism, and conveyed, credibly, many of the compressing effects of the ghetto: the loneliness it imposes on the drug dealers, and the wildly overdeveloped fantasy lives of those inhabitants who want a release. The human aspects of ghetto life were described as elegantly as the cold, abstract press of its systems.

The sociology in “Lush Life” is more complex, but once the basic suspense of the plot peters out, the characters begin to seem less like creatures who populate a culture and more like tools for describing it. The cops are a streetwise Latina and a limited but dedicated Irishman; the murderer has been sexually abused as a child. By the time Eric gets beat up trying to buy drugs in the projects and welcomes the blows as redemption, it becomes a little too easy to see Mr. Price’s characters as generic, stand-ins for sociological forces.

It may be inevitable that a novelist with these kinds of aspirations finds himself taking sides, but Mr. Price really disappoints when he starts to treat his chosen subjects with evident disdain. Which brings us back to the hipsters. There are moments late in “Lush Life,” particularly during Ike Marcus’s funeral, when Mr. Price’s disposition toward this young class is so intemperate that it reads like a parody version of Tom Wolfe. “To be friends with him,” one memorializer says of Ike, “was to be a member of an elite club, the future Hall of Famers of America.” “Ike was, like, great in bed,” says another.

There’s some element of corruption and triviality in the artistic effort of the young, sure. But it’s not just that: There’s also beauty and honorable ambition, and yet Mr. Price, having picked this culture to gaze at, can’t seem to find anything redeemable about it. You can’t help worrying that he is writing from behind some disabling generational screen, like those older novelists who go on for pages about people who talk too loudly on cell phones in public.

When Mr. Price wrote “Clockers,” he had the field — proceduralist ghetto realism — pretty much to himself. Not anymore. Not only have journalists and academics begun to consider the rawest parts of the modern city in more sophisticated terms, but the depiction of urban violence in popular culture has shifted, bringing us from “NYPD Blue” to “The Wire.” These journalists and entertainers now pay more aggressive attention to what had previously been assigned to novelists — the operation, within such systems, of personal will. Now that this subject has been so aggressively parsed, it is easy to wonder if there are good reasons left to write a novel about it.

For all its flaws, you can see in “Lush Life” some glimmering reminders of what those reasons are, and why this kind of social novel remains, despite those flaws, relevant. Mr. Price has no discernible ambition to address social structure, no need to find a moral lesson, a solution, or to imbue his characters with a false, suffering nobility. And though his efforts here are imperfect and sometimes small-hearted, Mr. Price’s great gift is the recognition that the daily rush and collision of city life yield up stories that are both riveting and true. He understands his own job, as a writer, is simply to get out of the way.

Mr. Wallace-Wells writes on national affairs for Rolling Stone and the New York Times Magazine.