City on Fire

New York State Of Mind

Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel, City on Fire is a long, ode to New York, following many strands with characters lost and hopeless in the city, where, like in any megapolis, the rich get richer climbing the scaffolding of the poor. Those who cannot fit in, find ways to self-destruct.

The novel is set between Christmas 1976 and 13 July 1977, when New York suffered a blackout. But before that a whole lot of characters have their lives intersecting without their being aware of it. Though there is no clear protagonist, the man at the core of the sprawling book covering swanky highrises and filthy squats, is William Stuart Althrop Hamilton-Sweeny III, scion of the country’s richest family, who wants none of the wealth or power his clan has accrued, mostly by foul means and spews his rage on canvases in a hidden studio. His father has married a social climber after the death of his wife, and her “Demon Brother” Amory Gould wrenches control of the empire—a small, white-haired man “plugged into every network you can think of, public and private… There’s no manipulation he isn’t capable of.”

The event that loosely binds all the strands together, is the apparently random shooting of a young woman at Central Park. William’s sister Regan, breaking up with her unfaithful husband Keith has problems of the typical single mother. It is Keith’s young girlfriend who is shot,; the victim, Sam, is found by William’s boyfriend, a teacher and aspiring writer, Mercer Goodman. Sam was involved with a punk band and her best friend Charlie (“a timorous weed sprouting from his combat boots” ) is drawn into that drug-fuelled hell of men like Nicky Chaos, Sol Grungy and a female groupie called Sewer Girl, who believe they are revolutionaries in a class war.

A polio-afflicted cop, a Vietnamese girl, her Austrian boss, an Italian fireworks maker, a journalist and many other are tossed into the rich and spicy cauldron of stories that whets the appetite of the reader and keeps at it over 944 pages of often dense prose -- have a dictionary handy, Hallberg never uses a simple word when a difficult one can be found.

It is not easy to describe the plot of this ambitious novel, because it contains many novels in its belly, including that maze-like whodunit – who shot Sam and why. Along with this are pages from a handmade fanzine that Sam brought out, a letter from a father to his son, transcripts of radio broadcasts, and other devices that offer breaks in the bleak narrative.

When the power outage hit New York—and Hallberg describes as frightening orgy of looting, arson and anarchy—it actually became the foundation for many real estate fortunes, when property was snapped up cheap by businessmen who went on to become real estate tycoons.

This book, that took Hallberg seven years to write, brings to mind another definitive New York novel, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, but this one is humorless and solemn—not a satire, but a meticulous word capture of an age that is recent enough to remind readers familiar with New York of the time of racism, unemployment, urban decay, youthful rebellion; it sounds like any city, today that has grown without any thought for the underprivileged. And rebellions have been doused effectively by consumerism.

City On Fire

By Garth Risk Hallberg

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 944