![]() Even when he is writing in the first person as himself (or someone very like him, as in his 2018 novel Vengeance), his stories look outward rather than engaging in a deep examination of his inner life. There is a consistent modesty in Lazar’s approach to narrative. Memoir about somebody other than “me.” An understanding that the story of other people connected to “me” might communicate more than the usual “me,” might show the cultural context of “me,” might even cast doubt on the viability of “me.” In his next book, the 2014 novel I Pity the Poor Immigrant (he’s got a thing for Dylan lyrics), a journalist character suggests something about Lazar’s own priorities when she describes her desire for a ![]() He writes that the moment the police arrived to inform his mother of her husband’s death is when “the current span of my memory really begins, in fits and starts, as if some clock in my mind had been reset to zero that day.” The book that Lazar wrote about it is a memoir in the tradition of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), in which the author, through a mixture of research and imagination, attempts to recreate the life of a parent-in Lazar’s case, one whom he barely got to know. Lazar’s father was killed when the writer was six years old, shot by two hit men in a parking garage in Phoenix, Arizona, soon after his first day of testimony to a grand jury about his former business partner’s illegal land deals. “What story could compare with his? The question was a more specific case of a larger dilemma: What could I ever do that would not seem trivial compared to what he went through?” ![]() “I have always had two ideas: that one day I would have to write about my father’s story, and that if I ever did so I would never be able to write another thing again.” This sentence appears near the beginning of Zachary Lazar’s 2009 memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder, and is then elaborated further.
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