Lazarus Man by Richard Price

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 12, 2024

Richard Price brings a unique and compelling voice to crime fiction. Lazarus Man doesn’t fit neatly into that genre, but crime is always in the background. Price chronicles Harlem life with the keen eye and vivid prose of Colson Whitehead even if he hasn’t yet won a Pulitzer. Lazarus Man is Richard Price in strong form.

The story takes place in Harlem, where residents are inured to violence. Calvin Ray, an ex-con, is now a community activist, having dedicated himself to teaching young men to find a nonviolent path. He organizes teaching events at sites of shootings.

The violence is never graphic but its presence is a constant undercurrent, leaving parents in fear for their children — including Anne Collins, a postal carrier whose son was shot (probably by accident) in the calf. Anne confronts the shooter because she knows that going to the police would invite retribution.

The incident that sparks the plot in Lazarus Man is violent but not a crime. A collapsed building in Harlem is not caused by a terrorist attack but by subway construction gone awry. The building falls on Anthony Carter, a mixed-race unemployed teacher and recovering addict whose wife left him, taking their daughter with her. Anthony is buried for a couple of days before being rescued.

In the days that follow, Anthony is pressed to give inspirational speeches — for Calvin and others — that amount to “whatever doesn’t kill you makes your stronger,” a message that he later refines. Some people who listen to him know better. Sometimes, the things that don’t kill you leave you in a world of pain and poverty. Lazarus Man isn’t a pollyannish novel, but Anthony genuinely believes that something in his message is true.

Anthony is the glue that holds the plot together, but the story has an ensemble cast. Mary Roe is a Harlem police detective who spends much of the novel trying to track down a missing man whose wife died in the building collapse. Her investigation leads to a poignant explanation of the man’s disappearance.

Royal Davis owns a funeral home that isn’t paying its bills. Felix Pearl is a 24-year-old with a video camera who aspires to be a filmmaker but earns money by filming playgrounds for the Parks Department, much to the chagrin of the parents of children he films and of cops who respond to their complaints.

Every character seems embroiled in a domestic drama. Anthony is separated from his wife Clare and his 13-year-old stepdaughter, with whom he is “increasingly reluctant to seriously engage.” He knows the time will come when Clare will ask for a divorce but he hopes to repair the rift with his stepdaughter. In the meantime, after making “sneaky eyes” at Anne Collins during one of Calvin’s events, Anthony dances around the possibility of dating her. They have difficult but honest conversations that middle-aged people should probably have more often before they decide to date. Mary's domestic drama includes a separation (she switches residences with her husband every three days so their children will have a stable residence) and an occasional unfulfilling motel shag with another detective.

Price’s character development is exceptional. Characters recall but do not dwell upon the events that shaped their lives, allowing the reader to understand the origin and development of their personality without bogging down the story. The characters have experienced varying kinds of pain. How people deal with pain is one of the novel’s themes.

Some characters change, as people sometimes do; one character’s transformation is stunning. Another concludes: “All I know for sure is that I have to make a life that I can live with.” One of the novel’s lessons is that “people are so much more” than we understand them to be.

Readers who dislike departures from genre formulas might complain that Lazarus Man doesn’t have much of a plot. How the lives of a half dozen characters in Harlem intersect for a few days is the plot. It isn’t clear that any one storyline is more important than the others — the characters all struggle to do their best — so maybe the point is that every life is important.

Still, the plot gains clarity as the novel nears its end. A fact the reader will assume to be true is proven false by something Felix captured on his camera. The revelation links back to an earlier scene that takes on new meaning, inviting the reader to view a central character in a different light. I imagine readers will have different reactions to the revelation, which might make Lazarus Man a good choice for book clubs.

In any event, the plot twist brings a message about the importance of hope. The ability to give hope to others, or at least to lift spirits, is a gift that merits appreciation. As does Price’s gift for storytelling.

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Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2024

Mark Haddon has to be my favorite living writer of short non-genre fiction. The eight stories gathered in this collection are nearly all gems.

Haddon often grounds stories in ancient history or mythology, finding new ways to make them relevant to a modern reader. The longest and — to me — the most interesting story is “The Quiet Limit of the World.” This story follows Tithonus who has been granted eternal life but not eternal youth by Eos. He ages slowly and discovers the curse of immortality; “what might have begun as grounds for envy or congratulations is tipping into something more sinister.” He leaves home because he does not want to endure the guilt of living when he will eventually bury his wives and children. Tithonus fights wars in the ancient world, survives the plague in the Middle Ages, is astonished by the destructive power of the twentieth century. Only Eos keeps him tethered to the world after he can no longer read or hear. The story is sad and touching.

Another favorite, “The Mother’s Story,” is the oddest entry, if only because it contains the sentence “My wife has given birth to a mooncalf.” Haddon explains that the story is “a reworking of the myth of Pasiphaë and her son Asterion, otherwise known as the Minotaur.” The woman must pretend to have been made pregnant by a bull to spare her husband the shame of fathering a repellant child. A scheme to use the child to terrorize (and thus control) the kingdom depends on a simple truth: “There is nothing more terrifying than the monster that squats behind the door you dare not open.” Followed years later by another truth that explains why people allow themselves to be ruled by leaders who hold power by making them afraid of others: “I sometimes think people get a great deal of unaccountable pleasure from being absolute fools.”

“D.O.G.Z.” retells Ovid’s version of the ancient myth of Actaeon. To punish him for viewing her mysteries as she was frolicking with other naked women in the woods, Diana turns Actaeon into a stag. The scene in which Actaeon is ripped apart by his hunting dogs is fittingly gruesome. The story has barely ended before the narrator begins to dissect it, comparing it to Acusilaus’s version and asking whether the story isn’t really about the dogs before exploring other dogs of literary fame as well as offering a poignant salute to Russian doggy astronauts. This is the only story in which it seemed to me that Haddon lost the plot.

“The Wilderness” is a tense story with the feel of a thriller. A woman is bicycling around the world to avoid coping with the loss of her brother. She has an accident while riding her bike in a remote area. Her rescuer saves her from death but brings her to a fenced-in place where she stumbles upon scientists experimenting with genetic editing. After a time, she wonders whether the scientists are turning her into an animal or whether she has she always been one. A daring escape leads to an encounter with other escaped women who are primed for revenge.

“The Bunker” might be an allegorical story. The protagonist is a nurse who finds herself from time to time transported to a bunker (a repurposed Cold War fallout shelter) in a postapocalyptic world. Is she losing her mind? The answer is unclear, although an exorcist who promises to lead her home apparently leads her to a terrifying new reality.

Also high on the strangeness scale is “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” The saint resists all the usual temptations that the devil puts in front of him before abandoning his solitary life to preach, only to realize that the devil is tempting him with a new trap.

“My Old School” is a boarding school story. The protagonist saves himself from bullying by betraying a school chum’s secret. Years later, the protagonist realizes how the betrayal affected the other student’s life.

Haddon explains that the shortest entry, “St. Brides Bay,” is written to accompany Virginia Woolf’s story, “The Mark on the Wall.” I probably should have read Woolf’s story to get more out of this one, which consists of an aging woman’s rambling thoughts as she attends a lesbian wedding. She contemplates progress and her mother and a woman named Lucy with whom she had a three-month fling when same-sex love was forbidden.

Haddon is a gifted storyteller and a prose master. Readers who love a carefully constructed sentence that is driven by original thought are a good audience for Haddon’s short stories.

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The Book of George by Kate Greathead

Published by ‎ Henry Holt and Co. by October 8, 2024

Domestic comedies appeal to me more than domestic dramas, if only because I would rather smile than cringe. The Book of George is an appealing blend of comedy and drama, although the emphasis is clearly on comedy.

As the title implies, the book follows a man named George. The story starts when George is 12 and ends when he’s 38. In George, Kate Greathead created a harmless and hapless character, one who is sullen, inconsiderate, and self-indulgent, an ideal protagonist for a domestic comedy. He isn’t as outrageous as Ignatius J. Reilly, but he shares some of that iconic character’s laziness, indifference to appearance, and ill-timed farting.

Like Ignatius, George lives at home with his mother, although only for parts of the story. George’s mother Ellen kicked his father Denis out of their Manhattan home when George was fourteen (Denis was dipping into Ellen’s trust fund to feed his shopping addiction). George does not see him often because, like most things, paternal visits feed the anxiety and depression that will characterize George’s life.

George attends college in Connecticut. He writes poems in a half-hearted effort to find an identity, but (despite having one published in a campus literary journal) abandons writing after concluding that’s he’s aping the style of David Berman. At a party to celebrate his poem’s publication, he realizes that “his own cohort’s lack of a group identity suddenly seemed pathetic. What did George and his friends have in common beyond being lumped together in the same dorm when they were eighteen?”

Random chance can produce friendships as strong as any other, but it doesn’t occur to George that he would need to develop a passion for something and join with people who share that passion if he wants to share a group identity. George’s search for an identity, as an individual or part of a cohort, becomes the novel’s continuing theme.

When a mysterious mass moves over his head one night, George views it as a celestial sign and decides to major in philosophy. He’s drawn to Schopenhauer, whose mother regarded him as “irritating and unbearable” despite his good heart. George is much the same. Perhaps for that reason, he believes that Schopenhauer wasn’t the “deeply cynical pessimist” that history has judged him to be. George recognizes his own cynical pessimism and sometimes makes an effort to change, but he also feels a need to be true to himself, even if his self isn’t someone he likes.

Having a degree in philosophy qualifies George to get a job as a waiter. He isn’t competent but he meets a waitress named Jenny who plans to attend law school. While they are dating, George begins working for his uncle in the financial industry, a brief career that gives George further opportunity to sit in judgment of the rest of the human race. The other traders focus on getting rich during the week and partying on weekends. George concludes (perhaps wisely) that they are not his people, but what group of people would claim Geoge as one of their own?

George maintains and on-and-off relationship with Jenny for more than a decade after college. More than once they break up and reunite. George’s inability to commit remains a barrier to a lasting relationship. In Jenny’s view, George’s greatest character flaw is “his absentminded disregard for others, his resistance to doing anything that posed the slightest inconvenience to him.”

When she eviscerates George’s character, Jenny hopes he will defend himself, but he tells her she’s right and that she deserves better. That George won’t stand up for himself makes him even less appealing to women, a fact that will be apparent to the reader even if George remains indifferent to how others perceive him.

The turning point in their relationship occurs when George and Jenny go on a road trip. They spend some unplanned weeks with a fellow named Dizart who lived with George’s parents for a time during his childhood and may have been having an affair with his mother. Dizart encourages George to take up writing. When George heeds his advice, the reader wonders whether he has finally found a passion that will motivate him to get out of bed (as opposed to antidepressants that don’t change his mood but rob him of erections).

George believes Jenny takes his depression personally, but there are many other aspects of George’s personality that trouble Jenny. She scolds him for poking holes in people rather than building them up. “It makes you feel better about yourself,” she tells him. “George couldn’t dispute this. He did not want to be such a person.” Yet change doesn’t come easily. It isn’t clear whether George will be a better person by the novel’s end.

None of this seems funny, but Greathead finds humor in George’s droll reactions to the world he inhabits. He attends a pre-wedding celebration and considers “this idiotic aspect of American culture: the aggressively self-celebratory nature of marking ordinary milestones as if they were some kind of hard-won victory or unique life accomplishment.” He returns to live with his mother, where he is soon joined by a pregnant sister who can’t handle her husband’s presence in her home. Asked to watch over a woman’s baby for a short time, George finds after a trip to the hospital that he is ill-equipped for parenting.

George stumbles through life, finding and quitting jobs but never finding one he likes. His best moment comes when he is cast in a Superbowl commercial that takes advantage of his grumpy face. If failed relationships and family deaths are excluded, his worst moment comes when he is bombarded with judgmental emails from strangers who mistake him for his namesake uncle, an English professor who lost his job due to relatively minor incidents of sexual harassment. Judging and condemning strangers is a widespread hobby in the age of the internet.

The novel ends as postmodern domestic novels do, abandoning their characters mid-life without resolving their issues. The novel’s interest lies in its characterization of George of a man without direction who suffers from deficient introspection. Notwithstanding George’s degree in philosophy, he seems uninterested in examining his life and finding ways to change. He has a fairly easy life but can’t appreciate his good fortune. He doesn’t realize that women regard him as handsome, that he might be able to exploit the acting gig he lucked into, or that he has benefitted from at least modest privilege associated with white New Yorkers who get carried through life by friends and family members.

Making fun of people might be mean, but readers can take a guilty pleasure in laughing at George as he drifts from one circumstance to another. George might be right when he says that he doesn’t deserve Jenny, a woman who is light years more advanced in the art of social interaction. Yet George is far from evil. Like Schopenhauer, he has a kind heart even if his attitude is insufferable. When George commits an unexpected act of kindness near the novel’s end, it does not signal a change but a moment in which George reveals a part of himself that he usually conceals. George’s character traits make him an interesting and sympathetic person, one whose life is worth a visit by readers who are looking for a chuckle.

RECOMMENDED

Blood Test by Charles Baxter

Published by ‎ Pantheon on October 15, 2024

The quality of being ordinary might seem like a curse to ordinary people. We are often told that none of us are ordinary, that everyone is special. When a Sunday school student tells Brock Hobson that he’s special, not ordinary at all, he rejects the premise. He knows he has no superpower. He thinks of himself as just one of God’s creatures, a boring one at that. Blood Test suggests that living an ordinary life with decency, charity, and forgiveness might be a superpower that anyone can develop.

Brock sells insurance in a small Ohio city. He has teenage kids — a son and a daughter — with his ex-wife Cheryl. His wife left him for Burt because Burt, while a complete idiot, is unpredictable (meaning impulsive), while Brock is “predictable as a clock.” Burt is also good looking and great in bed, qualities that offset his idiocy in Cheryl’s mind.

Burt belongs to a cult that believes particles in plastic bottles have “wormed their way into your bloodstream and your brain. The plastic promotes indifference and apathy and online shopping.” I knew there was an explanation!

The kids spend most of their time with Brock, even when they’re supposed to be with their mother. Burt belittles Brock’s son Joe because Joe is gay. Cheryl assures Joe that she loves him “even though you’re queer.” Brock’s daughter Lena is in love with her boyfriend and plans an idyllic lifetime with him, beginning by attending the same college. But when does the future ever follow a teenager’s plan?

Brock is a decent, conventionally religious midwestern guy. He feels sorry for the dead animal when he sees roadkill and imagines their last frightened moments of life, “though my grief is not excessive.” Brock is dating a woman he calls Trey. Her superpower is standing very still until deer and birds will take food from her hand. They make a good couple.

The novel’s amusing plot follows Brock’s response to a shady sales pitch for a product that can, by testing his blood and analyzing his answers to bizarre questions, predict his future. Brock would like to know whether he will do anything interesting with his life, so he pays the fee and takes the tests. The company predicts that he is “about to embark on a major crime wave. It’s all down on paper. I wish you luck and Godspeed.” He later learns that the crime spree will include a murder. Fortunately, the shady company can sell him insurance that will pay for his legal defense. The company even sells him the gun he will use to commit the crime.

It occurs to Brock that he now has complete freedom, including a license to kill. If bad acts are destined, we can hardly be blamed for committing them. “I can go wild,” Brock thinks. “I have a perfect alibi. The mainframe has said so.”

Apart from struggling with the ramifications of losing free will, Brock needs to decide how to address his son’s dark writings and drawings, the kind of things that parents should see as red flags. An apparent lunatic gives Brock some simple advice for dealing with his son: “Ask him what he wants.”

It’s probably not a spoiler to say that Brock (who occasionally speaks directly to the reader) reveals that the book isn’t about a blood test at all, but is actually a love story. I’m not sure I see it that way, although it might be a bunch of love stories, a romcom with an ensemble cast. Brock’s daughter is in love or in lust with her boyfriend. Brock’s love for Cheryl still motivates him to help her despite his betrayal. Cheryl’s love for Burt — even after Burt suffers a disability for which he blames Brock — is inexplicable. Brock’s love for Trey and for his son are integral parts of the story.

Brock might be predictable, but the plot is not. It leads to a duel, but only after Brock nearly shoots someone by accident. Gun violence is a problem in society that only becomes larger when someone as inept as Brock is armed. One of the novel’s lessons is that ordinary people don’t need guns.

Another lesson — at least in Brock’s view — is that being handsome makes life too easy. For losers like Burt, “having any woman you want degrades your character. The whole idea of monogamy stops making sense.” No sensible woman would want Burt for anything but his body. “Except for the gym and the hunting, Burt is lazy and empty-headed. He’s quite at home here in America, if I could generalize for a moment.”

There are also lessons in tolerance and forgiveness, on top of the question of free will. Fortunately, the lessons blend nicely with the plot’s goofiness. They don’t come across as lectures and never get in the way of the genuine laughs that the story inspires.

RECOMMENDED

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht

First published in Germany in 2021; published in translation by Liveright on October 22, 2024

The narrator in Eurotrash shares the name of the novel’s author. Whether the story is autobiographical I don’t know, although the narrator is a writer whose first novel was Faserland, as was the first novel of the real Christian Knacht. The line between the fictional Christian and the real one is blurred when the narrator’s mother, out of the blue, asks him whether is aware that they “are being described in a book right now, like Cervantes?” Blurring the line between reality and fiction is a staple of postmodern fiction, but I can’t say it ever impresses me.

Fictional Christian’s father, like the real Christian, had a father named Christian. After World War II, Christian’s fictional father was sent to America “to learn about democracy and bring it back to a ravaged Germany.” His father invented a fictional life in America, bragging of feats he never achieved. The novel’s early pages recount Christian’s attempt to learn the truth about his father.

Like a good bit of fiction from Germany, Eurotrash tentatively explores the impact of the Nazi party on the descendants of Hitler’s faithful. Christian blames his family for doing too little to resist the Nazis (particularly a grandfather who went through denazification and returned to Germany to organize a new group of Nordic nationalists). “The people to blame for the entire misery of the world are you and me,” Christian tells his mother.

Christian’s mother celebrated her eightieth birthday in a psychiatric ward. She was released to her apartment in Zurich because (in Christian’s view) she is able to fool doctors into believing she is in sound mental health. Christian’s mother enjoys cheap white wine, vodka, and phenobarbital. Perhaps those substances scramble her brain, but they probably help her cope with the repeated rapes she endured when she was eleven.

Christian tells himself that it is “an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family.” Christian may be fooling himself. Although Christian visits his mother in Zurich once a month, she complains that he is not an attentive son. Christian decides to take her on a trip, with the secret goal of depositing her in a vegan commune he saw in a brochure. He plans to tell his mother that the commune is a luxury resort and then disappear.

Christian hires a driver and off they go. Christian’s mother stops at her bank and withdraws a bag full of cash for their trip. She has a colostomy bag but she just fired her housekeeper, the only person who knew how to change it. On the trip, the task falls to Christian, much to his chagrin.

The commune’s pro-Nazi philosophy is not what Christian expected. The road trip continues, to Feutersoey for trout, to the mountains to see edelweiss in bloom, to Morges to see the house where Christian’s father died, finally to a Geneva cemetery to visit the grave of Borges. Perhaps Christian will even take his mother to Africa to see zebras, something she insists she has always wanted to do. Or perhaps he will tell his mother that she is in Africa and trust that her flirtation with dementia will turn the story into reality. Or perhaps his mother simply wills her own reality into being.

While Germany’s history hovers over the story like a storm cloud, the story that eventually emerges is personal. It is the story of a mother and son, both of whom feel guilty about the absence of a firm connection. They spend most of their road trip quarreling, perhaps developing a new understanding of each other, perhaps approaching a forgiveness that goes unspoken.

Although steeped in family history, the story generates sympathy for its two central characters, notwithstanding their aggravating natures. Christian’s approach to his mother is passive-aggressive, while his mother’s approach to her son is manipulative. Christian sometimes pokes at his mother, at other times listens silently as she criticizes him: “I simply preferred silence, as everyone had preferred to swallow down and conceal and keep everything secret, for a whole dead, blind, and nasty century.” The dynamic between the characters, culminating in a surprising and ambiguously touching ending, gives the novel its tragic soul.

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