I had been anticipating Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire for over a year, ever since I caught wind of its existence and the author’s celebrated six-figure contract with a big five New York City publishing house. It’s billed as a book about 1970s New York City, and the July 14, 1977 blackout is the temporal focal point of the events in the novel.

At eighteen years old, I landed in Manhattan in September 1974 for college and ended up staying (except for one year) until 1987, after which I still commuted to Manhattan and lived in the metro area (two states away in Bucks County PA).

Mercifully, during the blackout, I was living in a trailer working as an engineering intern (well-paid, not like today’s interns) at a power plant in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. After I left that job, I returned to Manhattan with an office in World Trade Tower 1 (95^th floor) from 1979-1981, though I spent much of that time reverse-commuting to a refinery in Elizabeth, NJ), and lucked into an apartment on the Upper East Side (400 sq. ft., street side!, third floor of a five floor walkup, with three locks on the door, and boasting a metal shower on top of an 18-in cement pedestal in the kitchen, one sink for dishes and toiletries, and a water closet). After the engineering job, I ended up working for almost two decades for McGraw-Hill, a major New York publisher (though not known for its literary fiction).

More recently, I co-launched an indie publishing company, and I fashion myself a writer of fiction, so I am well-versed in the vagaries of the lords of New York publishing, and the tens of thousands of writers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and beyond (can you see that famous New Yorker map cover or what?) seeking to jump the ditch between these two worlds. Incidentally, many of these writers and their agents are now querying our little publishing house in St. Louis (Blank Slate Press, now part of Amphorae Publishing Group).

So, I came to City on Fire with an all-consuming desire to read a “big book” about a seminal period in my life and a desire to understand how this relatively young author and his debut (debut, mind you!) novel manuscript were anointed by the all-consuming New York publishing community to be the 927-page cause celebre of lit fiction in the middle part of the second decade of the twenty first century.

When my wife (who now runs the publishing company) went to New York in May for Book Expo America, I politely told her not come back without one of the 700 free advance reader editions of City on Fire Knopf (the publisher) was going to hand out.

Others in the blogosphere (and the envy wing of struggling authors everywhere) had already asked the obvious questions, what’s a guy (Garth Risk Hallberg) from the American South born around 1980 have to say about 1970s New York? How did he get this amazing contract as an unknown (in part, apparently, because he was assigned a seat next to a big deal New York agent at the wedding of a mutual friend, according to an article in Publishers Weekly, May 4, 2015)? How could a major house risk so much on a 930-page debut from a complete unknown?

I would also add a few of my own. Why are all the back flap blurbs from people who sell books for a living, and the seven in the front written by the editors at Knopf and Vintage? Could they not find any better from the lit fiction “blurbosphere”?

A bipolar reaction

I read this book over four months. I travel a lot and it was just too weighty to take on trips (I do my serious reading in paper). For me, a “book I can’t put down” is one I do put down frequently just to catch my breath, savor the language, and prolong the joy. This wasn’t that kind of book.

Without giving too much away, here are the primary characters and plot elements:

• A rag tag group of punk kids and young adults are plotting and executing domestic terrorist-like events (against property mostly)
• A corporation, The Hamilton Sweeney Company, is doing corrupt development and “making money from money”; its corporate headquarters becomes a target for the rag tag bunch above (and the climax of the novel).
• Mercer Goodman, a young African American gay writer type guy from Georgia trying to “make it” in the city, takes up with William Hamilton Sweeney III, a rebellious Richie Rich artiste, in the early stages of the novel, but soon the two go their separate ways.
• Sam (Samantha), a Long Island girl whose dad is the pre-eminent manufacturer of fireworks serves as a conveyor belt among these worlds; she is shot on New Year’s Eve prior to the July 14 blackout.
• Charlie, a very confused Long Island kid and best friend to Sam, is much like Sam, but he’s not shot; instead, he (and earlier Sam) ends up attached to the nihilist punks seeking meaning through subversion, rock n roll, drugs, and explosives.
• A retired cop (Larry Pulaski) and a newspaper guy (Richard Groskoph) are running around trying to piece all of this stuff together; the newspaper guy gets taken out early.
• Regan Hamilton Sweeney (sister to William III) and her ne’er-do-well husband Keith Lamplighter experience family and marital problems suitable for any day or nighttime soap.

What I mean by bipolar is that I have two strong opposing reactions about City on Fire. Think barbell.

On the one end of the axis, this novel is precisely constructed, tightly woven, as sturdy as a brick shithouse (at least until the very end, which I address later). This is quite an accomplishment for 927 pages. In those four months of picking up and putting down this book, I rarely lost track of the characters, was always grounded in place and time, and could follow everything page to page, chapter to chapter. This is unusual for me. There are lots of big books out there I love, but I spend a lot of time confused and have to keep retracing my steps.

There are five principal loci of the action – the Hamilton Sweeney corporate building (and family residence), the lower east side hovel serving as the base of operations for the post-punk rock musician/junkie/nihilist/domestic terrorist kids/young adults, the apartment where William Hamilton Sweeney III (later known as Billy three sticks) and his gay lover Mercer Goodman live (For me, Mercer is  at least in part a stand in for the author, he’s from Georgia, he’s writing a novel, he’s moved to New York, he teaches high school English, he’s poor, etc), the residence in Brooklyn where the Hamilton Sweeney daughter Regan lives with her husband Keith and their two kids, and a somewhat peripheral Long Island location where Sam and Charlie migrate from.

Hallberg does an exceptional job of keeping these sub-worlds together. In this department, he’s got mojo on the order of gravity and objects in a solar system. I would have loved to see his plot diagram, his white board, his apartment wall where all of this was hatched, stitched, taped, and glued.

It all holds together, that is, until the ending (foreshadow number two).

But here’s the problem at the other end of this axis. This world, as I “felt” it reading this novel, is an amalgamation of post 9/11 NYC and 1970s NYC. I suppose you can say that’s where the fiction comes in, but still, it didn’t authentically reflect and enlighten my experience or, for that matter, that depicted in the dozens of NYC novels and short stories I have read (I am a sucker for NYC stories) or movies I’ve seen.

I mean, I wasn’t looking for Taxi Driver, or Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, Bright Lights, Big City (Jay McInerny, another author who cut teeth with a NYC debut novel), Lush Life, or Great Jones Street grimness, grit, and gore. But it’s 1977, for crying out loud. The Yankees are going to win the World Series, Miss Subways and Jacoby and Meyers posters line the subway cars, graffiti covers every surface, Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels are patrolling the underground, half the city openly smokes pot waiting in line at the movies and at the ball parks, Times Square is a cesspool of pornography, ghetto youth act out once the subway car empties and you’re the only rider left, the Port Authority could win the prize for skankiest city block sized enclosure in America, “Headless Body Found In Topless Bar” graces the New York Post front page, and a spread photograph of a bullet-riddled mafia boss in a restaurant in Little Italy is the only thing the daily papers will sacrifice the back-page front page of the Sports Section. Where’s WNEW and WPLJ, the pre-eminent rock radio stations of the era, in a novel with anarchist rock musicians terrorizing the city?

No one sane in 1970s New York City goes into the parks after dark, and yet the incident around which much of the story spins involves two white Long Island teenagers meeting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve 1976.

Sure, some of these details are included here and there, but they didn’t feel woven into the fabric of scene setting. And some details are so obscure, I wondered if they were placed as deep inside triggers for true New Yorkers. On page 908, the cop Larry Pulaski drives across a bridge in New Jersey “that for once merits his name.” I know this bridge only because I drove across it for more than a year reverse commuting to that refinery. It’s the Pulaski skyway. Talk about obscure references (and that air of superiority privileged only to current and ex-New Yorkers). The “West Side Angels” make an appearance on pp 804-805. I don’t recall Mayor Abe Beame making an appearance, or any politician for that matter.

In reaching the end of City on Fire, I was reminded of the World Trade Center buildings. They are so precisely constructed. The symmetry of all those windows in the sky is like an optical illusion. They rise majestically from the lower Manhattan skyline. No question, they are purpose-built towers, solid, functional, practical, everything a Hamilton Sweeney Board of Directors would want from an office building.

They are also ugly. Or at least they are not beautiful. They are tall shoeboxes from an architectural perspective. They were the tallest buildings in the world at that time. Though they have been mythologized and eulogized since 9/11, when they were built did they serve, beyond the practical, any function besides bragging rights for New York City?

Given the hype, I expected this novel to be like the view of NYC from inside those towers with binoculars, telescope even, not the view of those towers from the outside.

And so with City on Fire, I missed that 1970s feel, that cruel-to-be-kind urban landscape? If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere … well, if you could make it during that decade, you probably really could make it anywhere and anytime.

This book, in short, felt more like an edifice than edifying.

And the edifice begins to sway dangerously by the end. The attempted killing of the girl around which the story spins essentially disappears (the girl and her father appear but the crime dissipates like a New York minute), as does the whole sub-plot about the fireworks. One secondary character (the Asian woman, Jenny Nguyen, who lives in the same building as the offed-early journalist) and one tertiary character (the duplicitous executive partner at Hamilton Sweeney) rendezvous at the L.A. airport for no reason whatsoever other than to say that this box has been checked, yes, we’ve reminded the reader about them and they need to do something.

Jenny, incidentally, is a darling in the sense of another oft-stated admonition to writers, “kill your darlings.” In other words, get rid of characters which are a drag on the story. But let’s be real: These rules don’t apply when you’ve been anointed.

There’s an epilogue that seems to have nothing to do with the price of real estate on the Upper East Side (there’s also a prologue, so all you budding authors, don’t listen to agents who say, never have a prologue or an epilogue). The two gay lovers Mercer and Billy three sticks meet up after about a billion pages for no apparent reason, other than, I suppose, two lovers so important early on had to face off at the end.

Then on page 881 comes a long paragraph about Mercer’s novel, described much like, can you guess?, City on Fire: “In his head the book kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it.” And get this line at the end of that paragraph: “And clearly, he [Mercer] was no Homer. Was not even an Erica Jong.” The reading public will probably wait the same length of time that spans the lives of these two before such disparate authors are ever uttered in the same breath.

And an errant claim that “Elton John begat Queen, and Queen begat Frampton” surely alters my notions of 1970s rock n roll. It continues later with “Frampton begat Kiss who begat Alice Cooper, who begat Bowie…” Now maybe these statements are only through the eyes of the mixed up Charlie Weisbarger, but they took me right out of the decade this novel was supposed to be about.

In the middle of the box-checking march through the finale, Mercer encounters a “quartet of skinheads” looting the school Mercer taught at. Memory what it is, I still don’t recall skinheads being a “thing” anywhere but Germany in the 1970s. Bizarrely enough, these skinheads (who could be “off-duty Marines or alopeciacs”) take time off from looting to engage Mercer in conversation. And alopeciacs? Really?

I don’t mind so much the ending buckling. It is terribly difficult for even the best authors to craft an ending that doesn’t feel pretentious, rushed, tidy, or insipid. I don’t mind that City on Fire lacks lyrical prose. It’s muscular prose. It’s dense prose. It’s dense enough to keep me grounded at all times. And it’s consistent, also a stunning achievement.

But by the end I felt like I was wearing cement shoes.

The grand finale doesn’t so much resolve the plot points or character conflicts as it drifts towards the something terrible that is about to happen to the Hamilton Sweeney building. Then all these characters from the previous 850 pages re-appear in order for the author to check the requisite boxes.

And it has other elements which lack purpose, for one, a thirty page interlude that appears at page 498 (a little more than halfway through), excerpts from Sam’s diary/rebellious youth graphic ‘zine. I mean, it was a nice break in the action, but it didn’t, as we say incessantly in writers groups, “advance the story.” A second 32-page interlude appears between pages 761 and 782 (no, the numbers don’t add up) that, for some in explicable reason, explains most of the plot. On page 254, there is a reference to fireworks being directed by computer. Well, I leave room for technology advances I may have ignored on the inner pages of The New York Times during those years.

I do mind the use of obscure words that serve the same purpose as a composer who writes unplayable music. Look at me! Ambuscading, inveigle (I think I had to memorized this on in high school), perverdid, declivity, occiput, ailanthus, cormorant, unguent, ontic, pellucid, ratiocination, lapidary are a few I marked just for grins. I also mind a chapter (34 in this edition) that, out of the blue, switches to second person lecture mode. These may be the inevitable requisites of lit fiction to satisfy the academically oriented, and who knows, maybe there is deep meaning that only study in a graduate literature course will ferret out.

Don’t get me wrong, I was glad I read it. I’m happy to put City on Fire in the context of all the other NYC books I referred to earlier (and many, many more which line my shelves). If City on Fire sells well and earns the big literature prizes, I suppose the publisher can claim bragging rights. We built this! But in the end, the questions, for me, remain: why this author, why this book? Does it all come down to carefully arranged seating cards at a wedding reception?

I suppose it’s only natural to compare this novel to a similar one, Infinite Jest, from the middle of the last decade of the last millenium. After three attempts, I still haven’t made it past page 250 in that block of reconstituted wood. But I’ve spent countless hours discussing Infinite Jest with people who have read it and love it (two different reading groups, writing groups, my daughter, other aspiring fiction writers) that I feel I understand the essence of the book. I think one difference between the two tomes is that David Foster Wallace was clearly intent on telling a story in a unique way, through a new structure and use of hyperactive prose.

And back another two decades, there was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I almost got to the end of that one (but I was much younger then), but was so annoyed I decided not to give the author the benefit of my completing it. (I was big on personal and silent protest). I finished Hallberg’s City on Fire. And I was glad I did.

In sum, I admire the scale and ambition. I admire the construction. But I don’t read anything in City of Fire that advances the art of novel writing, of telling a big story in a big way. And I didn’t feel 1970s New York come alive in ways I had expected.