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.
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.
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.
