Zing Bam Boom: Richard Price’s “Lazarus Man”

Kazuo Robinson

1 year ago

Readers will recall that at the end of Little Dorrit, once all major characters are revealed to be connected and all the awful plots brought to light, the Clennam house collapses as a divine correction to human wickedness. Richard Price’s new novel Lazarus Man has as its one major incident the apparently more random collapse of a tenement building in East Harlem, with a story that develops in converging lines during the aftermath. The failed structure may be a symbol of urban blight but Price doesn’t have much time to spend with it, so quickly does he get to work on his plotting. The raised Lazarus is a survivor of the incident, Anthony Carter, a divorcé and stepdad in recovery from cocaine addiction, who speaks at community events about the epiphanies he had while trapped under the rubble. He looks familiar to a young filmmaker, Felix Pearl, who lives across the street and who captured some footage of the rescue operations. Royal Davis, owner of a local funeral home that doesn’t bring in enough bodies, will hire Felix to shoot a promotional video. And there is Detective Mary Roe, who will spend most of the novel tracking down a man who has been missing since the disaster, eventually getting herself involved in Anthony’s story.

After a short Part One (“Angels”), more of a prelude, in which Anthony is introduced in a sequence that seems to be borrowing too much from Invisible Man and eventually alludes to it, Price’s Part Two is subtitled “Boom”, and sees him settled into his main method, switching pretty frequently between his three other leads, letting Anthony lie for a while. As well as nine novels, Price has done a lot of TV and film writing, including The Color of Money and The Wire. The rotation between the storylines makes this novel feel like a film, but Mary’s storyline—a police procedural—feels more like television. This is borne out, as her search for the missing man doesn’t have enough material and has to be stretched out and slowed down, as if an episode of a TV show in which she stars has been spliced into the film that involves Anthony, Felix, and Royal. The parallel world of television and film is a strange place when you’re reading about it instead of watching it. Lines like “that was some speech you gave in there,” and “You really have a gift,” passable on screen, look pretty desperate on the page. The story very frequently requires backstory, and while these excursions often start with a character recalling a story to another character, the past dialogues are formatted as if we have gone into a flashback. Price has apparently not figured out how to show people recounting a conversation and remembering it their way. The narrator’s performance, with its smirking and ingratiating, is like a voiceover always straining for the right pitch, telling us that Anthony, a discerning bar-crawler, is like an “80-proof Goldilocks”, or that, “At six-three, three hundred and twenty pounds, there was nothing junior about Junior White”. When a quip will not serve and he has to describe something of a scene or a feeling, he’s in trouble, given to hideous mixed metaphors like “the underbelly of his propulsive sense of joy forever needing to be blasted away by the force of his will.”

Price is happy to put things in his narration like “neck of the woods” and “get a grip,” not just to have his characters say them. He is free with his syntax, sometimes pretty much careless. Like Elmore Leonard, he will float present participles as if slipping into an altered present tense, as in a sentence starting with “Mary looking around the block now,” but unlike the very musical Leonard, he has no ear to tell him when grammar is to be relaxed, how to keep things moving. There are moments in which the most direct note on a character’s feeling, something you might write as a basic analysis of the scene, is included in the narration, and when a detail of a major character’s life, missed before, has to be inserted over two hundred pages in: “‘That’s more than I ever did,’ said the SUNY Brockport sophomore-year drop out.” In a hospital room one finds “the ER doctor/trauma nurses/monitor techs,” written just like that with those forward slashes, as if we are reading a bureaucratic form (or indeed provisional scene settings in a film script). All this to say, sensitive readers may feel mildly insulted by this slipshod novel.

But Lazarus Man is eventually entertaining. Price seems to have been saving up his enthusiasm for the love story that develops between Anthony and a woman named Anne Collins, who after a brief introduction on page eight had been lost for the next hundred and ninety. Now, it seems, he can really get into the bantering rhythms, and the novel gets more interested in itself. He goes further, more boldly here than with any other storyline, beyond the silliness of film and television and into something else. Across the playground where Anthony’s giving one of his speeches, Anne greets him with the frank gaze of her “rivetingly bright silver eyes.” They have a flirting, confiding chat, and she lets him know she isn’t all that impressed with his Lazarus story. Why? She’ll tell him that, too: “Because, and strap in your seatbelt, we’ve been making sneaky eyes at each other since the door on in, and so if you have any interest…” All this has Anthony in a tizzy, “his heart going up and up like an elevator.” She liked what he said up there and wants to hear more. Soon they’re on a date at a seafood shack and she’s brought him polaroids of her at five years old. She wears tinted glasses so those robot eyes don’t draw looks from strangers, but he coaxes them off. They have such good rapport that they leave the place without even looking at the menu. This is all rather amusing, if not intentionally, and it might well save readers of Lazarus Man from boredom. Then we can give a contented smile to the contented, smiling ending, in which it is confirmed that Anthony’s inspired speeches, even if now partly deflated, are actually to be taken seriously. “Believe in that higher power, lean on it if that’s what you need to do, but for God’s sake believe in yourself.” If we’ve been made to laugh, we should be able to tolerate even this.