It’s always difficult to maintain one’s objectivity when reviewing a debut novelist who got a reported $2 million advance for a book almost a thousand pages long. The heft of it, a pain to hold, feels like a grandiose up-yours to busy readers and editors everywhere. And is anyone worth that much money?
It is a big ask, to give up weeks of your reading life to an unknown guy from North Carolina whose middle name is Risk. However, then you start reading this classic thriller set in a graffiti-splashed 1970s New York City, about a girl called Sam being shot in Central Park, and it’s immediately apparent that this is a writer who knows how to do suspense. You’re soon zipping through Hallberg’s vividly realised New York like a child discovering Hogwarts for the first time.
Every sentence has been carefully crafted by a literary sensibility in thrall to punk and Balzac, yet it’s unpretentious and funny. Before long you’re engulfed by the story of William Hamilton-Sweeney III, aka Billy Three Sticks, the strung-out punk frontman turned artist who is secretly heir to millions and has a rather sweet schoolteacher boyfriend called Mercer, and a cat.
As in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, this book’s closest genetic match, Hallberg’s city is a battleground for the war between the haves and the have-nots. Only the currency is not primarily money but belief. The powerful, corrupt elders of the Hamilton-Sweeney clan, who own half the city, believe in the plutocratic project and its ability to keep their lives as temperate and full of treasures as their apartments. William believes in precisely nothing, so seems like the perfect match for a splinter-group of anarchists, the “post-humanists”, who are planning a cataclysmic assault on the city’s gleaming spires.
City on Fire takes place mostly in 1977 and the meticulous period detail — typewriters, fanzines (faithfully reproduced within the text) and little orange cars — is captivating. Those of us who remember such whimsical artefacts are made to feel ancient but, on the plus side, the pre-digital age enables the thriller writer to make people actually get up, go outside and do things. Such as run around in a city-wide power cut trying to solve a murder.
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Each player in the race to find out who shot Sam is zealously fleshed out: Mercer’s journey as a gay, black, intellectual from the South reads like a classic of that genre; Charlie, a teenage, failed punk who was adopted by a Jewish family but secretly loves Jesus, is a novel in himself. Sam’s Italian immigrant family reveals yet another stratum of city life. There’s a beaky old Eastern European art dealer and a plucky young Vietnamese woman, too.
Hallberg, however, is not immune to overwriting. Dropped rolls of loo paper in a park “arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores”. Moody flocks of birds are shoved into any scene that might otherwise lack import. Some of the characters are unsubtle mouthpieces for Hallberg’s thoughts about his writing, such as when Mercer ponders how the enormous novel he’s working on “kept growing and growing in length and complexity . . . but how was it possible for a book to be as big as life?”
That this gigantic hunk of words is readable until the end is an achievement in itself, and it does feel every bit as big as life. Despite being a debut, it shows a technical maturity matched to a playful, sexy wit. Ultimately, though, it’s not a Balzacian or Dickensian investigation into the injustices of city life. It’s a thriller, albeit an extremely clever and stylish one. What Hallberg will do next is anybody’s guess, but this book definitely feels like the start of something big.
City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, Jonathan Cape, 927pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £16.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134