In his latest book "Outliers: The Story of Success," Malcolm Gladwell claims that outsiders have a competitive edge not only in politics, but also in business and sports. As Aleksandar Hemon proves with his new novel, "The Lazarus Project" (Riverhead, 2008), Gladwell's theory holds up in literature just as well.
An "outlier" himself, Hemon learned English as an adult and quickly achieved elite status as a writer in the language. Within 10 years of writing his first story in English, Hemon won both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur "genius grant," allowing him to complete two novels before undertaking "Lazarus." Clearly, a native command of English is not a prerequisite for superb writing.
While the plot of "The Lazarus Project" is complicated, it never trips over itself -- Hemon has the ability to push the limits of complexity without sacrificing clarity within his sentences or his intersecting plot lines. The book consists of two narratives, the first of which is the true story (told in a voice I'm still trying to identify) of the life and after-life of Lazarus Averbuch, a young, Jewish immigrant who was killed in Chicago by Chief of Police George Shippy in 1908.
The alternate narrative is told by Brik, a Bosnian immigrant to Chicago who is married to an American surgeon, Mary (Bible scholars, contain yourselves). The Averbuch case intrigues Brik once he discovers that Lazarus and his sister turned up in Marseilles years after Lazarus' murder. It seems the man, like his Biblical namesake, miraculously rose from the dead. Brik secures a research grant to investigate the story and returns to Eastern Europe to find out more about Averbuch's origins, bringing his childhood friend, the thuggish "ex-gigolo" Rora, along with him.
With his brutal sense of humor and hard-won survival skills, Rora is the perfect foil to the admittedly morbid, philosophical Brik. As the search becomes an introspective journey for Brik and Rora, their story comes closer and closer to Lazarus', such that by the end, paragraphs alternate between centuries, and Hemon takes away what little sense of time and place his readers once had.
Even though it's difficult at times to jump back and forth between the storylines, the disorientation of the book's readers mirrors that of Brik. Whenever we start to resent the effort it takes to navigate the plot, Hemon brings us back with his brilliant turns of phrase. As Gary Shteyngart wrote in The New York Times, "Hemon can't write a boring sentence, and the English language... is the richer for it."
