Gritty and compassionate ... Price has clearly inherited their storytelling chops, then fine-tuned those skills by persuading police to let him ride shotgun as research. He has an ear for streetwise dialogue and an eye for description. He can size up people with a phrase ... Not a cynical novel.
His books, including the new Lazarus Man, are also masterworks of character, atmosphere, symbolism and whatever else those scribes over in the supposedly higher-tone literature section might throw at you ... Price...remains one of the most rewarding, compulsively readable fiction writers around.
The novel has all the trappings of fiction as gritty urban social portraiture ... Yet it isn't ... What Price has given us is a retrograde novel. It is animated by unreconstructed, unembarrassed humanism ... A trauma novel without a trauma plot ... The genius of Price’s novel is that it rejects all mechanistic accounts of human existence—tragic or utopian, religious or otherwise—without downplaying the social forces that shape lives of labor.
Arresting if occasionally diffuse ... Meanders for a bit, but there’s a hint of the payoff. Price is acclaimed for his naturalistic dialogue and exuberance; and here it mostly gels ... Halfway through the novel Price gathers his cast at a rally, and the plot gains clarity and purpose. The author’s feel for urban settings and psychology serves him well ... There’s candor and grit in Price’s portrait of a middle-aged man flailing in an emotional quagmire; ironically it’s an actual quagmire that opens a path toward absolution ... Astute.
Shaped more by mood than plot. Mr. Price has likely entered his artistic late period. His storytelling is a little more diffuse and introspective than in previous books and his characters’ emotions are more on the surface ... Will speak to readers with a few more years behind them.
Endearing, vibrant ... It’s gratifying to see this master of urban storytelling resisting the lure of Hollywood long enough to publish another rich novel of New York City life ... Vivid ... The novel has a surprisingly tender heart. Even its abrasive and self-deluded characters remain lovable in their own way, and they accord one another a remarkable amount of grace.
A book difficult to categorize because its tone and action are neither comic nor tragic ... 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 ... 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.
A memorable scene in which a woman spins an unnecessarily elaborate tale while begging for money brilliantly illustrates that we are natural storytellers, none better than Richard Price.
For all the darkness in the novel with its 9/11 overtones, there’s a sense of transcendence in the Harlem community’s shared experience and survivors’ spirit. An affecting novel by a literary urbanologist in top form.
