Novels You Live: A Guest Post by Garth Risk Hallberg
Hardcover $32.00
The Second Coming: A novel
The Second Coming: A novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $32.00
The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg is a story of fathers and daughters and the lengths we’d go to for the people we love. If you missed it earlier, listen in to Garth on our Poured Over podcast, when he joined us to talk about writing likable characters, self-discovery and trauma, his literary influences and more.
The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg is a story of fathers and daughters and the lengths we’d go to for the people we love. If you missed it earlier, listen in to Garth on our Poured Over podcast, when he joined us to talk about writing likable characters, self-discovery and trauma, his literary influences and more.
We asked Garth to take us behind the scenes of The Second Coming, and this is what he said:
There are novels you read, and there are novels you live. Probably an ideal life includes a generous helping of each. But when I sat down to write The Second Coming, I found myself focused on the latter. The tale I had to tell involved some of the hardest parts of my coming of age—depression, addiction, family dysfunction—but also the ones that had made me the person I am. So how to write about personal transformation in a way that would feel like a transformation? How to take the reader on the kind of journey I’d discovered in the books I’d loved most?
I began with the story of two people: Jolie: a troubled New Yorker about to turn 14, and her father, Ethan, a recovering addict living on the other side of the country. The novel follows this estranged pair through the ups and downs of their separate lives, gradually pulling back to reveal the hole each has refused to see. In Jolie’s case, she is sinking into depression, grieving the loss of her dad. In Ethan’s case, he has conflated recovery with isolation, projecting his various failings onto the people around him. Each inhabits a protective solitude, imagining it’s possible to live that way forever. They’re like specimens under bell jars, not even seeing the glass.
But such solitude is not sustainable, particularly for people facing the twinned afflictions of depression and addiction. As with all of us, the stakes are mortal: change or die. And one of the things this book taught me is that transformation happens only in connection with other people. At the end of the first chapter, I encountered a crisis that throws Ethan and Jolie back into relationship. Which of course meant conflicts, mix-ups, schemes, betrayals… The question was whether the love between them would be enough—whether either of these characters had what it takes to save the other. Hence the title.
And for all that, it felt important that there be a certain lightness throughout. The journey of transformation, at least as I’ve experienced it, can be surprising and thrilling and sometimes ecstatic (the novel you read), but also painful and daunting and perplexing (the novel you live). To undertake this journey in fiction would require from the reader a certain kind of commitment. So I wanted, on every page, in every paragraph if possible, little bursts of pleasure, promises of the illumination I imagined pouring in at the end.
The reward for the investment, in the kinds of books that have seen me through my own changes—from Anna Karenina to Augie March to Toni Morrison—has been valuable in a way I still find hard to put into words. Indispensable, in fact. But in a novel, half the fun is to be had along the way.