The buried and the unburied

Imagine waking up beneath the rubble of a fallen five-story tenement in East Harlem three days after its collapse. You’re bruised and sore, your lungs on fire from the dust and fibers you’ve inhaled during your days of limbo, but otherwise you are unscathed. Would you see this as a second chance at life? No one would have expected to find you alive. Everyone would consider your survival a miracle. Would you have a message for the people astonished by your continued existence? What would you tell them? What would you do?

These are the questions Richard Price explores in Lazarus Man. Yet he doesn’t ask the questions early. The novel focuses elsewhere for roughly the first third of its 337 pages before pulling the Lazarus man, Anthony Carter, out of the rubble. That delay begs us to ask why it exists. What purpose does it serve to introduce Anthony at the beginning of the novel and then set him aside to focus on other characters for roughly 100 pages after the collapse of the tenement sets everything in motion in the novel’s brief first act? What’s the story here?

According to some reviewers, there’s not much of a story at all. Apart from the precipitating event, the building’s collapse, there’s not much capital-D Drama. Instead, for 100 pages, Price focuses on the smaller stories that play out in the wake of the larger destruction. These stories follow three characters who each have a different connection to the collapse. Felix Pearl is a young aspiring photographer who lives in an apartment close to the explosion and responds to the building’s collapse by snapping pictures. Royal Davis is the owner of a dying funeral home who wonders if the collapse might lead to better business. Mary Roe is a community affairs officer and former detective tasked with identifying the tenement’s residents, both listed and unlisted, as well as its victims and survivors.