Richard Price’s Radical, Retrograde Novel

In his tenth novel, Lazarus Man, Richard Price is, to borrow one of his own lines, on a “hunt for moments”—snapshots in time, chance encounters, fleeting interactions that reveal someone or something in a startling new light. “I’ve got like X-ray eyes for the little gestures that go right by everybody,” he explained in a profile timed to the publication of his 1992 novel, Clockers. “I don’t go for the big picture so much as a lot of little big pictures.”