With novels like Clockers and Lush Life, Richard Price (The Whites) has long been lauded as an expert observer of urban life in the United States. Lazarus Man, a streetwise story of a small group of New Yorkers brought together unexpectedly by tragedy and the quest for redemption, will only enhance that reputation.
On a spring morning in 2008, 42-year-old Anthony Carter is pulled from the rubble of a five-story East Harlem apartment building 36 hours after it collapsed with a "primordial volcanic roar." An unemployed, recovering cocaine addict whose wife and stepdaughter have left him for California, Anthony happened to be walking by the building on his way to a job interview at the moment of the accident. After he appears on television describing his rescue--"like something out of the Bible"--he's transformed improbably into a sought-after motivational speaker at events that include a community rally against gun violence and the funeral of a teenager killed in a street shooting.
But Anthony isn't the only person whose life has been altered irrevocably by this catastrophe. Felix Pearl, a young videographer and photographer, is drawn to the collapse in his neighborhood and records the events. Mary Roe, a Community Affairs police officer charged with interviewing witnesses and searching for potential survivors, as well as Royal Davis, a disgruntled funeral director who sends his son out on the street with cards trolling for business from victims' families, are also drawn involuntarily into the event's reverberations.
With his keen eye, efficiently constructed scenes, and, above all, crisp dialogue that evokes Price's work on TV shows that include The Wire, he follows the lives of these world-weary characters over the course of roughly 10 days, while artfully revealing the elements of their pasts that have brought them to this singular moment. At the center of the story is Anthony, whose teaching career halted after an attack by a student, and who has struggled since then to gain footing in life. His sudden unearned celebrity only complicates his personal challenges. But almost equally intriguing is Mary, enduring her own marital fracture as she doggedly pursues her hunch about one unaccounted-for resident of the apartment building, all the while haunted by memories of her father's boxing career.
Lazarus Man's appeal mainly depends on Price's skill in stirring readers' sympathies for these engagingly flawed characters and portraying the world they inhabit with a gritty realism. To the extent there's any drama in the novel, it's reserved for a moment close to the end of the story, but when it appears it only provides further evidence of Price's confidence and talent. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: A tragic building collapse in New York City brings together four characters struggling in different ways to right their lives.