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.
Anthony himself is pulled from the rubble after three days. “I was asleep,” he tells his rescuers, which is odd since we know that the night before the disaster, he passed out on sleeping pills and vodka in the apartment he inherited from his recently deceased parents — in a building that has not collapsed. But then again, we also know that Anthony is a liar.
Mary’s investigation into the whereabouts of Christopher Diaz — a missing resident of the collapsed building and the husband of one of the dead — brings us into the neighborhood’s bodegas and check-cashing storefronts. Felix’s quest to become the new Weegee takes us to an East Harlem playground, where he has a gig monitoring the zone for the Parks Department (a job that occasionally gets him called a creep), and to neighborhood denizens like O-Line, whose stint as a linebacker for the New Jersey Generals in the 1980s left him walking with two canes.
From Royal we learn a lot about the job of the “funeral man,” a trade passed through generations of his family that now feels like a curse, especially after his dreams of playing in the N.B.A. washed out and he spent a couple of years playing in Israel and Budapest, where even the home-team fans were disgustingly racist.
All of these characters are highly sympathetic, and it’s diverting to listen to them talk. Price, an accomplished screenwriter (“The Color of Money,” “Sea of Love”), is rightly famous for his ear for authentic dialogue, but he has chosen in this book to eschew not just plot but drama and anything that might be called stakes. The book drifts for 200 pages without much happening, the building collapse notwithstanding.
Will Royal sell out his share of the funeral parlor to his brothers so they can sell the building? It certainly seems like he wants to be done with his job. Will Mary ever locate Christopher Diaz? It’s not as if he’s even suspected of any crimes. Will Felix hook up with the pretty girl from the corner who scams him for train fare to fetch a dog she doesn’t have from a nasty ex she hasn’t broken up with? He does, and in the morning he wakes to find she has stolen his fanciest camera.
Instead of drama there is constant cutting among characters (in the manner of a television serial) to elide the sense that there’s no story. There are pages overflowing with perfectly pitched dialogue that comes to seem more and more merely slick, especially in the last third when a few of the characters finally start getting laid (“Cocaine is all about loss,” one ex-addict tells another, to inexplicable erotic effect). And there is an accumulation of back stories that might generously be called offbeat or eccentric but are too often just quirky. Mary, whose father was a boxer who left one of his opponents permanently incapacitated and then had an affair with his wife (a robust premise for a novel that is treated here in a half-dozen pages), has a phobia of crossing borders and can’t bring herself to go to New Jersey or Connecticut to interview witnesses. You’d feel sorry for her if the condition didn’t plainly sound like nonsense.
As for Anthony, his new identity as the “Lazarus man” pulled from the debris brings him minor celebrity and a hobby as an inspirational speaker at funerals and other neighborhood gatherings. His speeches, which we hear at length, captivate audiences, despite consisting of empty bromides about hanging in there, sometimes for God. It’s hard not to agree when Anthony himself calls his talks “platitudes to the real sorrowers,” a fitting and unironic line in a novel that is constantly undermining itself. You might say, “It’s one of those books.”
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