City on Fire - Garth Risk Hallberg

It’s difficult to approach City on Fire without acknowledging a couple of facts up front: first, the considerable length (a touch over 900 pages in the hardback edition), and secondly, the considerable advances which have paid to debut author Garth Risk Hallberg (around $2 million for the US rights alone, and a reported six figure sum for the UK). Even if you’re not put off by either of those issues, they are likely to colour your views on the novel before you begin reading. You might be expecting this to be the next Infinite Jest, a sprawling, post-modern masterpiece; and you might expect the author to be a preening hipster. Neither of these would be accurate, as it happens – the narrative is fairly conventional, and my impression of Hallberg was that he is a decent, humble guy - but these are the barriers that the novel needs to overcome.

City on Fire opens in New York, in December 1976. This is still the city of freaks and drop-outs; effectively bankrupt, the city is on the verge of chaos: for the inhabitants, ‘everything, personally, world-historically, was breaking down’, and punk is primed to overturn the old order, purify New York so it can be born again. The question is, what will emerge in the wake of this scorched earth policy – a new bohemia, or else a gentrified, corporate supercity?

What we see is that the leading figures on the sides of money and the counterculture are mirror images of one another. At the heart of underground movement is Nicky Chaos, ‘the nihilist you can’t say no to’, leader of the Posthumanist faction and tone-deaf singer in the band Ex Post Facto. Modelled on Richard Hell, down to the ‘Please Kill Me’ t-shirt, there is also something Mansonesque about Chaos’s dark charisma. He is the dark side of countercultural idealism, exponent of ‘the death trip, the destructive trip, the internal contradictions… the return of the repressed’. A Machiavellian figure, who usurped the band’s former singer Billy Three Sticks, he brainwashes his followers, Sewer Girl, Sol Grungy and the rest to follow a mantra of ‘saying no to everything’.

His counterpart in the moneyed elite is Amory Gould, ‘the Demon Brother’. Married into the wealthy Hamilton-Sweeney family, Amory swiftly goes about manipulating himself into position as the power behind the throne, ensuring that the family heirs are either alienated or in debt to him. Through a series of shady real estate deals, Amory is set to profit massively from the gentrification of New York – but he is reliant on the Posthumanists creating the ideal conditions in the city for his schemes to flourish.

Linking these two worlds is William Hamilton Sweeney III, aka Billy Three-Sticks, original singer in Ex Post Facto, heroin addict and artist. Rebelling against his family, he is the Ur-punk of the story, but is not politically-driven; Nicky’s manifestos alienate him, and he becomes increasingly insular. The only characters who come close to him are his sister Regan, who has gone into the family business despite her loathing of the Demon Brother, and his lover Mercer, a black teacher. Another link between money and the street comes in the form of Sam Cicciaro, a student who is drawn to the Posthumanist group, whilst carrying on an affair with Regan’s husband. Through Sam, the gawky suburbanite Charlie is also introduced to the milieu surrounding Nicky Chaos.

On New Year’s Eve, Sam is shot, in a park opposite the Hamilton-Sweeney penthouse. This incident is the point around which the various interlinking narratives revolve, as Hallberg plots the complex relationships which join the multitude of characters. With washed-up journalists, crippled cops, paranoid punks and corrupt corporations all trying to find out the truth of what happened to Sam, a noir-ish plot is set in motion, coming to a head in the middle of a blackout which paralyses New York.

The question of belonging is important to City on Fire. There is something quite Brideshead about the relationship between William and Mercer: Will is privileged yet indifferent, while Mercer is constantly aware of the social gap between them, and is at once fascinated and overawed by the family’s status ('it being his lot in life, apparently, to play nursemaid to the Hamilton-Sweeneys'). Being drawn into the Hamilton-Sweeney orbit can be perilous: Sam is shot on the doorstep of their apartment building, while Mercer becomes a suspect as the police can’t imagine what he would be doing in the neighbourhood.

The other theme which Hallberg returns to throughout the novel is the corporatisation of American life. A major subplot concerns Ralph Groskoph, a journalist looking for the grand narrative of American life which will secure his reputation. He finds it in the story of Carmine Cicciaro, a second-generation immigrant who had been responsible for co-ordinating civic firework displays in New York until he was priced out by companies who could cut costs through mechanising their operations. Carmine’s marginalisation, and the shooting of his daughter, represents for Groskoph a loss of traditional American values of hard work, ingenuity and family – the death of the American dream.

A lot has been said about the increasing influence of box sets on modern fiction; novels like The Luminaries and All Involved are supposed to have been inspired by the structure of HBO series like The Wire, balancing multiple narrative strands and viewpoints, and arranged around key dates or events. To me, though, it feels more like a return to Victorian storytelling. And this is the odd imbalance in City on Fire: Hallberg is using old-fashioned techniques to tell a modern story.

The mismatch between style and content is most apparent in the author’s vocabulary. In pre-gentrification New York, we have ‘mesozoic’ sticks of butter, and characters might study ‘the deciduous rings of an LP’. Weak sunlight is ‘eschatological’. Actually, weather descriptions are a particular weak point. At one stage, we hear that ‘the sky, as usual, is perfervid’. I know I’ve often caught myself thinking ‘oh great, perfervid sky again’. It would be fine if this verbosity was restricted to certain characters, but it is pretty consistent throughout, which brings us to the novel’s second problem: a lack of narrative variety.

To successfully carry off a novel of this length, an author must be flexible enough to create a range of contrasting voices, as Marlon James did in his brilliantly polyphonic Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings – another hefty book, but one where the sheer variety of distinct voices meant that the narrative remained fresh throughout. There are signs that Hallberg is aware of this, and we do get breaks in the narrative, in which he gives us pages from Sam’s fanzine, or from Richard’s essay on Carmine. In these sections, Hallberg adopts distinctive voices to great effect, and I wanted more of this. As it is, there just isn’t enough to distinguish the various narrators who make up the bulk of the novel.

And finally, the length. Does City on Fire justify the massive investment of time needed to read it? There is definitely good stuff going on here: while the prose sometimes rings false, Hallberg is strong on plotting, and skilfully handles the interlinking storylines. The premise is exciting, and the dynamics between the characters are well developed. There’s a very good three or four hundred page novel in here; as it is, I feel like the epic scale of City on Fire is too much for the author to pull off, at this stage. I don’t want to write Hallberg off though: he can tell a story, and I think that he will write better novels in future. It was always going to be tough for this novel to live up to the pre-launch hype, and we shouldn’t be surprised that it struggles to. This is an interesting but flawed book - I’m not saying don’t read it, just that you shouldn’t expect miracles.