Is there a better writer of urban American stories than Richard Price? His resume is hart to beat: To episodes of HBO’s “The Wire,” and “The Night Of,” and novels like “Clockers,” “Lush Life,” and “Freedomland,” fans can now add “Lazarus Man.”
The story opens with a boom, literally. A five-story tenement in East Harlem collapses, killing dozens and leaving survivors milling about in a “mix of hot tar, cement dust and burning trash.” Into that setting step our main characters: Royal Davis, the owner of a funeral home forced to chase after tragedies for bodies; Mary Roe, a city detective working the community affairs beat; Felix Pearl, a 20-something new to the city who’s talented with a camera; and Anthony Carter, middle-aged, unemployed, and six months sober, found in the ruins days after the explosion and who becomes the novel’s title character.
Here’s Price inside Felix’s head as he watches the “gigantic neighborhood simpleton, Robert Cornish, aka Green Mile, aka the Rooster” wandering the streets before his 80-year-old aunt comes outside to retrieve him: “Not to say that his neighbors were nonstop hearts and flowers toward each other, but no one ever passed judgment on you for just being who you naturally were.”
It’s the details. too, that Price always nails. Mary, reminded of her time working an open-air morgue outside Bellevue Hospital after the 9/11 attacks: “(She’d) been part of an assembly line of detectives set up to collect whatever IDs they could from wallets and phones, jewelry and watches, the constant sharp snap of fingers being broken in order to remove rings still with her after all these years.”
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