Sex, Drugs, & Rock And Roll In the Sprawling City On Fire

First-time author Garth Risk Hallberg proves that “Risk” is his middle name for a good reason: his debut, City On Fire, is an ambitious, thousand-page historical novel, one as stuffed with character and incident as the Gotham where its story takes place. It combines the topicality and verve of Jennifer Egan’s similarly music-obsessed A Visit From The Goon Squad with the setting and tone of Rachel Kushner’s jaundiced, 70s-in-the-Big-Apple epic The Flamethrowers. In fact, with its similarly incendiary title, Hallberg seems to be giving Kushner a clear nod.
Toward the beginning of the book, someone attacks a young woman on New Year’s Eve, 1976, outside a fancy cocktail party thrown by one of the city’s most illustrious families, the Hamilton-Sweeneys. Two of the scions of this family are our protagonists: Regan, the responsible though unhappy daughter, and William, the irresponsible, estranged, still unhappy son. We also spend much time becoming intimate with their partners: Keith, who married into Regan’s wealth determined to prove himself worthy, and successful enough to exist independent of it; and, more sympathetically, Mercer, a transplant from rural Atlanta, Georgia, an outsider in every way whose love for William could be called crippling.
Three other protagonists also share the spotlight. Richard is a world-weary yet obsessive journalist, returned from a self-imposed exile to try to capture the zeitgeist as well as the professional glory that has so far eluded him. And Samantha (Sam) and Charlie are teenagers from Long Island: big-eyed wannabes and music-lovers who sneak in from the suburbs for a shot of adrenaline until, of course, they end up with much more than they can handle.
Hallberg is as observant of the details of interpersonal relationships as he is of the atmospheric disturbances of urban life. We watch as Keith justifies one self-destructive business choice after another, increasingly desperate to show his wife he can make good, no matter how many times she makes clear all she wants is for him to be good to himself and his family. We see Mercer uncover more and worse secrets about his remote, damaged boyfriend. We note that the hapless Charlie has fallen hard for the charming Sam, but that Sam has her sights set on more dangerous and more exciting things than an adopted, asthmatic boy from her hometown.
We observe it all from the front lines, where Hallberg has placed us, and guided by him we understand it perfectly.
Readers expecting a crime story, or even a noir, won’t find what they’re looking for. The violence with which the book begins fades into the background noise of New Year’s Eve: not forgotten, exactly, but remembered as something of a blur, juxtaposed with the jarring screams of downtown punk music and the cruel repartee of uptown socializing, and squinted at through the fog of a hangover. Mercer is originally taken in for questioning about the crime, being a black man found at the scene, albeit one who was only there to help, but City On Fire is not a book about blatant racial injustice, either. Hallberg is more interested in how life is unfair in more subtle, insidious ways.
He’s also interested in creating a kind of multimedia text that will re-create, in a sense, the dense, textured experience of being in New York City in the 1970s. Certain pages are handwritten. An illustrated black-and-white zine, purportedly the work of Sam, is reprinted in full as one “Interlude.” Another medical form, which becomes a long confessional memo, serves as another. Scribbled entries from a notebook titled “Evidence” serve as a third. And so on. Hallberg jumps us backward and forward in time, not so much giving us histories as letting them accumulate around his characters into landslides of drugs, secret abortions, secret children, addictions, and betrayals.
Some readers may lose patience with the scope of this novel, its insistence on telling so many stories at once, while others will find its nontraditional structure immersive. But everyone should admire the magnitude of the task Hallberg has set for himself: to reveal, through a climactic city-wide blackout, the truths of so many people, truths long hidden from those they love most as well as themselves.