When the explosion shakes New York’s East Harlem one morning in 2008, Royal Davis is dozing in a coffin, his face itching behind a prosthetic as students film a zombie movie in his funeral parlour. Veteran detective Mary Roe is arresting a homeless man who has just presented a bank with a ransom note. And would-be film-maker Felix Pearl is struggling to sleep in the multi-tenanted brownstone he calls home before his room starts to “flutter” and he is flung into the wall, his nose popping with blood.
The blast comes from a five-storey tenement that has collapsed nearby, cloaking everything in acrid dust. As sirens wail and helicopters hover “like small black spiders beneath the roiling sky”, Price’s ensemble mobilises. Royal, spotting that death may be on onlookers’ minds, enlists his young son to pass out business cards. Mary begins to search for the missing. Felix grabs his camera to shoot: a man yelling at oncoming traffic, another praying by an ambulance, a mute, ash-caked woman standing with her howling dog.
Richard Price follows the action with a roving gaze of his own, moving from one short scene to another as he charts the days that follow. It’s a shifting, dialogue-led approach that’s characterised much of the New Yorker’s gritty work, with scriptwriting credits including The Color of Money and multiple episodes of The Wire. His fine novels have taken in Bronx youth (The Wanderers), the drug trade (Clockers) and murder investigations (Lush Life); crime is often at their heart, but Price is generally less interested in the act itself than in its impact on society and the merciless churn of the streets. Writing about cops, he has said, is “like having a backstage pass to the greatest show on Earth”.
So while the building collapse raises questions – one character wonders if it could be “terroristic shit”, while British readers will think of the Grenfell disaster – Price simply has a cop reveal a grimly mundane explanation by text: “100+ yr old crap tenement v underground subway extension excavations vibrations / for months / boom”. Instead, Lazarus Man puts us in the thick of the repercussions, charting a community trauma that might also offer its characters a new start.
As Mary tracks down unaccounted-for residents, Royal struggles to save his business and Felix picks up work for a local community group, another figure emerges from the rubble. Thirty-six hours after the collapse, troubled former cocaine addict Anthony is found half-conscious in “an airy mangle of brick and wood”, his lungs burning and his back bruised, but the rest of him – miraculously – working just fine.
Before the collapse, Anthony was unemployed and aimless. Now he wonders if “this was all God’s plan”. People hang on his words: reporters call, he goes on a fruitful date; he speaks at local events and a memorial for the dead. Doubts buzz in his mind, but he reaches for sincerity, and finds the right words to convey it. “A young boy is like soft clay,” he tells an anti-violence gathering, “and the street can be a brutal sculptor.”
Price weaves his four main plot strands around neighbourhood life with masterful skill. Yet, while circumstances shift and revelations emerge, the book rarely moves beyond a simmer, instead shuffling to a close with some heartfelt but slightly bland philosophising. This lack of a grand resolution is part of the point: that real-world tragedies cannot be neatly packaged, and redemption is rarely clear cut. But Lazarus Man’s lack of suspense means it can feel a little aimless.
The flipside of the novel’s sometimes underwhelming centre is that the margins stand tall. Price’s relentless curiosity is undimmed: we learn why a mortician wears blacked-up hiking boots, visit a wild evangelical service, and scour cheque-cashing laundromats and dive bars. The dead receive brief, respectful eulogies, while supporting characters – a former cop known as Sambuca Boy who now works for Citibank and recites chakras, a woman who claims to be Prince’s mother and Barack Obama’s sister, a man who returns from a hook-up with his lover to find his wife dead beneath the rubble – shine in the background. Lazarus Man may lack a killer punch, but its generous heart and ear for hard-bitten gossip offer plenty of rewards.
• Lazarus Man by Richard Price is published by Corsair (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
