Nothing succeeds like excess, according to the American publishing industry. Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, Hanya Yanagihara...just a few of the authors straining our wrist muscles and bowing our bookshelves. And now Garth Risk Hallberg, the 36-year-old whose 912-page debut, City on Fire, fetched $2m at auction. Film rights were sold before the book even reached potential publishers. The evangelical advance praise includes this verdict from Vogue: “City on Fire is the kind of exuberant, zeitgeisty New York novel...that you’ll either love, hate, or pretend to have read.”
Well, I have read it — all 912 pages — and I do not love it and I do not hate it. It’s kind of OK. Hallberg is a smart, hard-working writer who can deliver a decent product. His 2007 novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was a comfortable take on Argentine novelist Julio Cortazar’s experimental Hopscotch. The 63 short chapters can be read in any order, and each is accompanied by an Instagram-ish photo. Cortazar’s edginess, safely repackaged for the 21st century: the literary equivalent of a chichi food truck serving “street food” drizzled with truffle oil.
The 1970s setting of City on Fire feels similarly cosmeticised, “grit” sprinkled as liberally as fairy-dust in Disneyland. It is a period drama set in the bad old New York of arson, heroin addiction and mass unemployment: “Graffiti suppurating on the metal shields of storefronts.” “Punk had picked all the locks, sluiced out into the grid.” We are building up to the city’s 25-hour blackout in July 1977, with all its attendant chaos and glamour.
The large cast is impossibly interconnected, which isn’t necessarily a problem: Hallberg is clearly out to tell a Good Old-Fashioned Story (shored up by occasional metafictional acknowledgment of its artificiality). The novel initially seems to promise a classy thriller coupled to a Franzen-style Big Social Novel. By page 132, we have a victim of gun crime, a cop called Pulaski, a journalist in a fedora, and lashings of motive. Add to that a marriage in crisis, some dodgy business dealings and several messed-up childhoods, and this reader at least was ready to get fully engrossed. But Hallberg is the equal of neither Franzen nor Dick Francis, and both genres suffer from the attempted coupling.
The structure has been meticulously thought out — an advantage, you would think, in such a big novel. Book I (of seven) takes place on New Year’s Eve 1976-77, dropping us into the middle of the action. Book II covers 1961-76: any backstory lightly hinted at in Book I is now ploddingly overexplained. The next two books repeat this pattern; action, then backstory. Points for thoroughness, but Books II and IV could be cut in their entirety. As it stands, all the Social Novel stuff fatally slows down the thriller element; while “who-killed-who” starts to feel like a cheap trick to get us through the backstory.
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Hallberg’s imagery can feel like symbolism for beginners, with fireworks cropping up all over the place. “History, scenery, fate, impermanence, disaster, politics, the city, all packed into a single shell, awaiting combustion.” There are loud Hamlet parallels throughout, with a schoolboy’s essay on Hamlet reproduced just in case. (Inspired by Franzen’s clunking use of War and Peace in Freedom, perhaps?) Oh, and there’s a religious thing going on, too, with the gunshot victim as a Christ-figure in a coma, attended by a teenage “prophet” and some Harley-Davidson Hells Angels.
This novel has it all — except the spread betting doesn’t quite pay off. By the end I was getting bored. Each short chapter follows a different character, but it often takes Hallberg a page to make it clear who we are watching. The whodunit is unsatisfying and includes some weak plotting. The connections start to become ridiculous. Sentences can be clumsy — “Now, the sirens he’s braced for having failed to eventuate, he slows to a walk” — but at the level of the prose, Hallberg’s worst vice is a penchant for elegant (read, pompous) variation. “The Christmas tree looked lonesome in its corner, with no furniture to surround it. All it took to turn a tannenbaum unlovely, it turned out, was direct sunlight.”
Too often, the dialogue comes from film. The director Scott Rudin has said that “it doesn’t need to be massively reinvented to be a movie”. Which is true — and problematic for the novel as a novel.
Some of this might be just about OK, allowable, in a shorter debut — this is, after all, Hallberg’s (sort of) first novel. What is not OK is a 912-page novel that is only OK. You need a better reason to demand this much time of your readers.
Cape £18.99/ebook £18.78 pp912
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READ: Garth Risk Hallberg speaks to Bryan Appleyard, in Magazine