Bad vibrations: Lazarus Man, by Richard Price, reviewed

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath.

The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has cost him his job and relationship with his wife and stepdaughter. Pulled from the rubble 36 hours after the building’s collapse, he emerges as a local celebrity, offering inspirational talks that he worries are ‘bullshit platitudes to the real sorrowers’.

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After debuting in the mid-1970s with a quick succession of autobiographically inspired novels, Price pivoted to screenwriting in the 1980s, with film credits including Sea of Love, Ransom and The Color of Money. He was drawn back to the page to write Clockers (1992), a masterpiece of the crime genre that became a Spike Lee film and inspired the television series The Wire, on which Price worked as a writer.

Clockers was followed by other police procedurals that mapped urban ecosystems such as a fictionalised Jersey City or the Lower East Side, including Freedomland (1999), Samaritan (2003) and Lush Life (2008). Lazarus Man is the first novel published under Price’s name since Lush Life.

The book bites off another chunk of the Big Apple – this time animating Harlem, where Price has lived since 2008, when the book is set.