If you’ve watched HBO’s The Wire, then you’re familiar with Richard Price. As one of the show’s writers, his story lines were like urban sociological studies. Price’s novels, such as Clockers, Lush Life, and Samaritan, also display the constant pressure-cooker environment within high-density neighborhoods. Plus they are just flat-out fun to read, as is his latest novel, Lazarus Man. For example, if you’re amused when coming across a random character being described not merely as “thin,” but as “thin as a home-rolled reefer,” then Price might be for you.

Make no mistake, Price’s work has depth, often finding its way into university course catalogs. Still, we read novels not for outright edification. It’s the story and characters that earn our attention. And Price always delivers on that front, replete with his trademark snappy dialogue. Where Lazarus Man moves a little differently is how the novel unfurls. There’s an initial event, and then we just follow four main characters as they carry on. It’s not unlike Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, where we shadow characters just out living their lives. In Lazarus Man, it’s not 1990s Los Angelinos we’re tailing, but four East Harlemites in 2008. Maybe their paths will cross. Or maybe they won’t. Regardless, it’s their proverbial journeys we’re joining.

The anchor character is Anthony. He’s forty-two, unemployed, well on his way to a divorce, and attempting to kick a cocaine habit by trying out every bar on Lenox Avenue. Like some “80-proof Goldilocks,” he’s seeking the one bar that’s just right.

Then comes the event that sends the novel on its way: a tenement building collapses. Nearby, Royal, a down on his luck, third-generation mortician—who pretty much loathes his job—dozes in one of his unsold coffins. In order to make some extra cash, he’s playing the corpse as a group of film students shoot a horror film in his parlor. The sound of the building’s collapse sends Royal bolt-upright in his casket, properly freaking out the film students. Royal then has his young son put on an ill-fitting suit and go out into the chaos to hand out mortuary business cards.

Felix is a taciturn 20-something photographer who moved into the city from upstate. He grabs a camera and gets to work around the wreckage. Emergency personnel arrive as both survivors and nearby neighbors mill about, the “ash-coated” and the unscathed roaming together. The neighborhood becomes like some sort of “hallucinating block party.”

Mary, a beleaguered detective, is charged with finding out if an unaccounted for man is either somewhere in the rubble or is passively trying not to be found. A few years earlier, a freak elevator accident almost killed Mary. The event seems to have rattled her enough that she’s leaned back from most human relationships. It’s not that she doesn’t care. It’s more that she cares too much.

A victim of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, no one thinks to look for Anthony in the debris. When he’s eventually unearthed, he becomes a minor local celebrity, called upon to speak at various community events. He’s good at it, providing an outlet for pent-up community grief that goes beyond a collapsed building. The real question is whether Anthony believes what he’s saying.

Anthony’s mother was Black and his father white. Both are recently deceased, with Anthony now living in their apartment. Anthony’s long spiral began when he was kicked out of Columbia University for selling drugs. Someone suggested that he claim the university singled him out because of his race, but Anthony wanted no part of it. He knew that wasn’t the reason. Besides, his father was constantly charging racial discrimination on behalf of the Black community. Sometimes he was correct, yet at other times he wasn’t even close. Either way, he was always making a public scene about it. In many ways, Anthony wanted the same thing as his Black neighbors: for his father to shut up and mind his own business.

There is a surprise development at the end of the novel, underscoring the epistemological breakdown that fact and truth cannot be used interchangeably. Throughout, all the characters strive to do the decent thing in a difficult world. A good example is a mother who shows up to a community event to complain about how the cops harass some of the neighborhood teenagers. When a police officer at the meeting points out that her son often hangs around known gang members, the mother says that fact doesn’t mean he’s doing anything wrong. She continues, “You live in a certain place you got to be crewed up to not be a target. It’s a negotiated life.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

It’s little wonder that Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake made it onto numerous “Best Books of 2024” lists. Through the voice of Sadie Smith, a mercenary spy, we’re told of her infiltration into a farming commune in southwestern France. As with Sadie’s real name, her employer is unknown. But it’s clear that clandestine corporate interests view this commune as a major threat to large-scale agribusiness expansions. Regardless, it’s not the spy craft that elevated this novel to critical acclaim. It’s the uniqueness and depth of Kushner’s writing. Kushner primarily delves into two characters, taking us inward and—at times—back tens of thousands of years.

We know this much about Sadie: she’s 34, a Berkeley PhD dropout in rhetoric, and a former (fired) FBI agent. She’s also quite the user of people. To be fair, a spy is a user by trade. But it feels different with Sadie. It’s as though she disdains the subjects she manipulates simply because they are so easily manipulated. Sadie feels little remorse, for she believes most people are poseurs of some sort when they adopt their own respective identities. “People can sometimes pretend so thoroughly that they forget they are pretending. At which point, it could even be said that they are no longer pretending.” In this instance, the group Sadie pretends to join is known as the Moulinards.

Sadie’s contacts point her to a Parisian (Lucien) who is old friends with an influential commune leader. Within a matter of months, Sadie and Lucien are living together, moving her closer to the commune. It’s yet another easy exploitation, for she already knew Lucien “believed he deserved to fall in love.” At the same time, she accesses the email account of the Moulinards’ spiritual leader, Bruno Lacombe.

For a cult to exist, it must orbit an individual who alone possesses “the truth.” As with many cult leaders, Bruno rejects civilization, known among the activist communities as an “anti-civver.” Bruno in fact doesn’t even live with the Moulinards. He spends most of his time in a cave, worshiping a failed species: the Neanderthals, or Thals, as Bruno calls them. Ostensibly, Bruno steps out of the dark long enough to occasionally use his daughter’s computer, sending missives to the group on what he’s gleaned down in the deep.

Bruno laments the world that was lost when the Neanderthals went extinct. Because we know—and live—how the human drama is playing out, the Neanderthal world is a tabula rasa for Bruno, and for anyone who wants to cleanse their mind of commodified images. This deprogramming takes place underground, by the “modalities and visions that darkness” promises.

Sound ridiculous? Of course. It’s ready-made to mock. But does Kushner give it depth nevertheless? That she does.

As Sadie winds her way closer to the Moulinards, Kushner not only returns to Bruno’s disquisitions, but to the life traumas that sent him into darkness. After surreptitiously reading Bruno’s emails, Sadie questions whether the commune’s inhabitants actually understand and deserve Bruno’s insights. Such questions are not part of Sadie’s mission, of course. But, then again, you don’t have to be a spy yourself to see that she’s at risk of losing control.

Still, Sadie performs her role well, eliminating potential threats to her mission by offering preemptive threats, as she does to an older French man who questions her identity. Her return threat leaves him looking “dejected and childish, like I had just taken something that belonged to him, and broken it, and handed it back.” However, when traveling by high-speed train through the countryside and becoming startled by the sudden appearance of another high-speed train traveling from the opposite direction, we know it means more than Sadie being startled. A reckoning is afoot.

One early morning, Sadie looks outside and says, “For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints.” We can substitute “Sadie” for “dawn” in that sentence. With Sadie, how long can she keep these disappearing acts up?

There’s piercing intelligence in Kushner’s writing. It’s not just her crackling writing style, where a hill left devoid of trees via logging looks “like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition.” Kushner writes Sadie as a scary smart individual who knows there are always sectarians among radicals, where a division can be made that will kill the whole.

It’s clear to Sadie that the existence of a charismatic leader speaks more to what the followers need to believe than what the leader is saying. Taken further, it’s why people are so credulous of the fantastical. Cryptozoology endures because people want to believe that there’s evidence of the unexplained. Why are there still Bigfoot sightings? It’s because people want to believe in Bigfoot. Even Bruno concedes as much.

The questions Bruno elicits within Sadie are more complicated. To be sure, Bruno’s theories at least point to a fossil record. After that, it’s a whole lot of conjecture. But, in the end, we’re not really talking about Neanderthals. To Sadie, it’s like waking up in the middle of the night and confronting your true self. “When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.” It’s “the four a.m. reality of being.”

It’s fitting that Bruno exists only to Sadie through his writing and that he doesn’t even know of her existence. When orchestrated events arrive and things become tense with the Moulinards, Sadie—detaching, as always—says to herself, “You people are not real to me. No one is.” This could have been just as easily said by Bruno. In many ways, it’s time for Sadie to step into her own metaphorical cave.

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Review by Jason Sullivan