Richard Price Rises Again With Lazarus Man

Forbes

21-03-2025

The cover of RIchard Price's latest novel, Lazarus Man
The first sentence in Richard Price's latest novel Lazarus Man is a paragraph long and made me wonder if Price had watched that three-part Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway – because it's a nod to that master, delivered in the cadence of Price's vernacular.
'It was one of those nights for Anthony Carter, forty-two, two years unemployed, two years separated from his wife and stepdaughter, six months into cocaine sobriety and recently moved in this late parents' apartment on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, when to be alone with his thoughts, alone with his losses, was not survivable, so he did what he always did—hit the streets, meaning hit the bars on Lenox, one after the other, finding this one too ghetto, that one too Scandinavian-tourist, this one too loud, that one too quiet, on and on, dropping dollars and heading out for the next establishment like an 80-proof Goldilocks, thinking maybe this next place, the next random conversation would be the trigger for some kind of epiphany that would show him a new way to be, but it was all part of a routine that never led him anywhere but back to the apartment, this he knew, this he had learned over and over, but maybe-this-time is a drug, you-never-know is a drug, so out the door he went.'
After this Papa-esque word ramble, the sentences retreat to a more contemporary length, but the tone and the forward momentum is set. The words bop to the idiosyncratic beat of Price's characters.
The inciting incident in Lazarus Man is the collapse of a Harlem apartment building and four lives that are affected by it, a white female police officer who does community liaison work, a Black funeral parlor owner, a White freelance photographer and videographer, and The Lazarus man himself, a Black man who was seemingly rescued from the building long after any other survivors and who becomes an inspirational speaker.
Let me disabuse you of the notion that there is a conventional plot. There is not. There are, for sure, the elements of plot, such as a police investigation, a man's attempt to save his business, and another man's search to give his life meaning, stability, and, above all else, love. But none of these are the driving engine of the novel. As a novelist – as a storyteller — Price has arrived at a place where plot is no longer paramount. Besides, in Price's novels, it was never about plot. With Price, it is about place.
Places like the Bronx of The Wanderers and Bloodbrothers, like the Jersey projects of Clockers, the lower east side of Lush Life, and in Lazarus, Price is taking us to Harlem.
It's not the Harlem of the Harlem Renaissance, or the Harlem of the Guiliani years. It's the Harlem of the beginning of the 21st Century. It's a Harlem where new rubs shoulders with old, white jostles with black, generational denizens crash into newcomers.
Now, just because there's no plot, doesn't mean there's no story. Lazarus Man is very much about the stories we tell each other and ourselves about who we are. Price's character's stories unfold as they negotiate their own steeplechase to find a sense of home. Price doesn't follow the old writing adage of 'write what you know' so much as he writes about what he wants to know, who he needs to learn from.
Paris, France - September 26, 2010: Richard Price, American writer. (Photo by Ulf ANDERSEN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Price has written ten novels, and many, many screenplays (including Sea of Love, a perfect script, Ransom, The Color of Money and most recently, with fellow master dramameister Steve Zaillian the compelling limited series 'The Night of' . It is safe to say that he knows things about how dialogue can tell the story.
This is how good Price is. Here are just a few lines from Lazarus Man that tell you all you need to know:
She picked up the phone again.
'Hey.'
'Hey yourself.'
'Kids with him?'
'Yup. Yours?'
'With her?'
'So…'
'So, yeah.'
The Harlem of Lazarus Man takes place in a time not so long ago before everyone stopped answering their phones, mostly because they are staring at one screen or another. It was still a time when people interacted, where they showed up in person to meetings, where people gave talks, speeches, and generally tried to guide others in what they should or should not be doing. Those days are no more, as is caring about everything each of the characters worries about, as they wander untracked by devices and social media. But Price has brought them back to life in Lazarus Man, not drive plot but to remind us, as Linda Loman said, that 'Attention must be paid.'
And that's the thing: Price pays attention.