Garth Risk Hallberg’s "City on Fire" captures a New York City so dark and dirty that it rarely appears in the spotlight. Unlike most novelists who try and capture the city that is consistently the subject of America’s titillating imagination, Hallberg shows no interest in having readers fall in love with his city.
Dirty, grungy, punk New York City of 1977: Hallberg paints a picture of a New York City littered with heroin needles, swarmed with men searching for illicit sex, and propagated by pyromaniacal groupies. It is this New York of the underground that Hallberg’s characters populate. Even those who inhabit the skyscrapers—both literally and figuratively—far from the underground activities of below, are related to New York’s dark and surreptitious scene.
The point-of-view narrative follows six characters who are intricately tied to an attempted murder plot that occurred on New Year’s Eve, 1976. Hallberg introduces his characters methodically. The prologue introduces us to an omnipresent and anonymous voice, who only hints at what is to come. We then meet the gay couple of Mercer Goodman and William Hamilton-Sweeney III. Mercer, a young black teacher hailing from small-town Georgia, takes up with the brooding and mysterious William, who happens to be progeny of New York’s largest fortune. William, known to some as Billy Three-Sticks of the punk band Ex Post Facto, has connections to the Post-Humanists, an underground cultish group that has plans for revolution. Next we meet Charlie Weisbarger—adopted, asthmatic, and charmingly geeky, Charlie follows his friend and shooting victim Samantha Cicario into her passion for the underground scene. Other characters that bolster the background include Regan Hamilton-Sweeney, William’s sister; Detective Pulaski, investigator for the New Year’s Eve shooting; journalist Richard Groskoph, who takes an interest in Samantha’s father, a fireworker; Nicky Chaos, ringleader of the Post-Humanists; and of course, Amory Gould, executive at the Hamilton-Sweeney Company but otherwise known as “the Demon Brother.” Hallberg’s plot is complex and well-crafted. He invigorates the story with a letter to William from his distant father, a collage-like excerpt of a zine written by Samantha, a draft of Richard Groskoph’s article, and a 2003 Adult Wellbeing Assessment of Regan Hamilton-Sweeney’s son. Hallberg cuts from one character to the next and one moment in time to another as deliberately and meticulously as he places these excerpts. By the end of the novel, if you are in the highly unlikely situation of being impressed with nothing else, you must stand in awe of the craft of this modern epic.
Despite its masterful precision and complexity, "City on Fire" raises some issues that readers must simply accept if they are to enjoy the novel. Hallberg centers his plot on fewer than a dozen characters, all of which are related by bloodline, a mutual connection, coincidence or circumstance. Take Keith Lamplighter, for example. His ex-wife’s brother is William Hamilton-Sweeney III, his young lover is Samantha Cicario, and he has worked closely with his ex-wife’s step-uncle Amory Gould. Despite these characters’ vast dividers—they not only have economic disparities, but social and geographic differences as well—they are all closely bound by the book’s plot. And in a city that in 1977 had seven million other inhabitants, it seems hard, if not impossible, to believe in all the connections Hallberg throws at us. Indeed, other parts of the novel appear forced, both in the language and in the plot. It is Hallberg’s accuracy that, although praiseworthy in many ways, falls flat in its flow. “His attention was uncomfortable, hot, like the light on a surgeon’s forehead just before you go under,” writes Hallberg, coercing an analogy into existence. The attempted murder plot, too, is propelled forward only by pieces of evidence that Hallberg forces onto the scene. At one point, Charlie urinates on himself, removes his first layer of pants (because he just so happened to be wearing two), and throws them in the bushes, leaving a concert ticket bearing an important symbol—critical to linking the post-humanists to Samantha—left to be found by Detective Pulaski.
Whether this novel is good or not seems to have little importance at the close of the 900 some pages. Sure, parts could have been cut to make the book less unwieldy and more efficient, but to pick it up in the first place you would have had to accept its heft. It seems difficult to deliver a verdict on a story with this much, well, story; ultimately, it is masterful and a wonderful accomplishment for a first novel.
