Book Review: ‘Lazarus Man,’ by Richard Price

LAZARUS MAN, by Richard Price

We first meet Anthony Carter in a barroom, and the first thing he does is tell a lie. “I went there too,” he says to a woman he’s vaguely interested in picking up, referring to her Fordham Rams sweatshirt.

The gambit goes nowhere — the woman borrowed the shirt from her cousin — and anyway Anthony never went to Fordham but to Columbia, where he was kicked out after a few months for dealing drugs. The expulsion was a waste, since he didn’t need the money. But it is the first of a long string of disappointments that have brought Anthony, now in his 40s, unemployed and separated from his wife and stepdaughter, to this bar on Lenox and 123rd in Manhattan because “it was one of those nights,” as the book’s first line has it.

After tying one on at the bar, Anthony stops at a second-floor church where he is entranced and repulsed by a charismatic female preacher: “HE CAME IN BECAUSE HE HEARD THE NOISE, GOD.” He goes home and to bed, with a job interview for a retail position the next day.

Anthony is one of four central characters Richard Price follows in his 10th novel, “Lazarus Man,” a book difficult to categorize because its tone and action are neither comic nor tragic. Unlike previous Price novels, it’s not a police procedural, though there is a detective looking for a missing person. A specific place and a broad sociological interest in its residents tie the book together, as do the Lower East Side in Price’s “Lush Life” (2008) and the fictionalized Jersey City (called Dempsey) in “Clockers” (1992) and other novels.

In the Harlem of “Lazarus Man” it is the spring of 2008, a temporal interzone before the catastrophe of the financial crisis, the political ascent of Barack Obama (mentioned only once, near the end) and the advent of the smartphone. You might say, “It was one of those years.”

The novel’s unifying event is the collapse of a tenement building that kills six residents and draws its protagonists to the smoldering rubble. Detective Mary Roe is among the police officers who report to the scene to account for the dead, the survivors and the missing. Felix Pearl hears the early-morning noise from around the corner and shows up with his camera. He’s a young man with an obsessive vocation as a photographer but only hazy notions of how to make a living at it, and how and why to become an artist: He at least knows he should be looking for the action. Royal Davis, a funeral director, is looking for clients because business has hit a rough patch, so he sends his young son Marquise to the collapse site to hand out business cards to the possibly bereaved.