Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder - Softcover

Zachary Lazar is also the author of the highly praised novel Sway. He lives in Southampton, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey, where he holds a 2009-2010 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. He received a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Evening's Empire is his third book.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Carolyn See Reading "Evening's Empire," the story of a man who died without ever getting a clue about the world, you can't help but remember "Death of a Salesman." "Attention must be paid," Willy Loman's anguished wife recites, and the same imperative applies here. Arthur Miller regarded the blindly optimistic salesman with compassion, of course, but also from a vast cultural distance. Miller could see the limitations, the pitifulness of Willy, but he himself was bright, highly educated, aware -- a genius -- and very far away from his salesman's humble drama. On the other hand, in this unpretentious memoir, Zachary Lazar is in the same awful story as his parents and unsuspecting grandparents. When his mother grieves for her husband, it's not in measured tones meant to be remembered for generations to come. It's something entirely different. "I could hear my mother laughing," Lazar writes. "When I went out to see what was happening, she was sitting on the couch, bouncing and rising like a marionette, or as though someone was shoving her from behind, only to yank her back upright with her blouse in his fist. When she looked at me, she screamed, her face distorted. The scream was angry, personal, insane." Zachary was 6 years old. His father, an accountant of modest means, had been gunned down that morning in the stairwell of a Phoenix parking garage. Plenty of attention was paid at the time to this death, but of the decidedly uncomforting tabloid variety. This memoir marks the attempt of the adult son to track down the events of the murder of his father and create a meaningful context for them -- if there can be such a thing. He works like a journalist, and we (mercifully) never see his mother again in this narrative. Instead, we are transported to Arizona in the late 1960s and early '70s, where the Lazars, a young couple named Ed and Susie, make a respectable marriage and become part of Phoenix's respectable Jewish community. They buy an unprepossessing tract house, have a couple of kids, Zachary and Stacey, and make it a point to have dinner with the grandparents every weekend or so. They're happy, but from what the adult Zachary can find out by interviewing friends and relatives from that time, there's a streak of discontent in Ed's life. He had wanted to be so much more than the average accountant. And hey, it was the '60s. More and more, as we live in America, the '60s come to seem like a sweeping epidemic of something vaguely disgusting and inconvenient, like herpes. Many people didn't catch the bug, but many people did. People seemed to feel they could do what they wanted. And something strange was going on in Phoenix. The city was surrounded by miles and miles of worthless land, simply crying out to be sold to credulous suckers, and there was a ready crop of them being raised across the Pacific, as servicemen left Vietnam with money in their pockets that they wanted to invest like grown-ups. A sleaze-ball named Ned Warren had recently come to town. Here he was, creating housing developments out of arid sand, rocky cliffs and a few starved cacti. Customers could buy land for homes in Chino Valley, Chino Meadows, Chino Grande, whatever. Sometimes they got roads and power and water along with their purchases; sometimes just cliffs that you couldn't pitch a tent on. No matter. Ned Warren sold these plots, then sometimes sold them again. Often, there were no titles to be had, no deeds. How did the author's father manage to get mixed up with this crook? No one knows exactly what Ed was thinking, of course, but he apparently realized what was going on in this scheme and got out of it after a couple of years -- a lot poorer than when he went into it. He offered to give evidence in return for immunity in the government's case against Ned, but he was shot to death in that parking garage. This little Arizona land scam was in some ways a mini-precursor of last year's sub-prime mortgage debacle. America never lacks for scoundrels or suckers, but which category did Zachary Lazar's father fall into? His son tries to find out here, in every kind of scholarly and journalistic way. It's terribly sad, this book. The author wants to honor his father, in the Old Testament sense of those words, but he's also bound by hard truth. He sees the pettiness, the futility. America, meet your pathetic hopes and dreams. Zachary, you've accomplished an amazing feat of filial piety. And reaped only sorrow from it, I imagine. bookworld@washpost.com
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