City on Fire

City on Fire had been in my sights for a long time. Rumors floating around the book put their hooks in me nearly a year prior to its release. 900 plus pages, a setting in late seventies New York, connections to the Bowery punk scene, I’d buy into a whisper of any one of those alone. And of course, the hype. Oh the sweet, indulgent hype. Sugary and colorful and determined to pull me in. Not a few newspapers and magazines reported Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel had snagged him a multi-million dollar advance before it was finished. I first read an article about the book in mid 2014 and from then on waited patiently. Hell, I pre-ordered the thing in hardcover.

Weight of expectation like this can only set you up for disappointment, right? I won’t make you wait like I did; this one was a let down. City on Fire is a safe story. The end is lightly triumphant for the characters but largely tepid. The plot is a formulaic even as it tries a few stunts and turns. So, am I really going to bash a guy and a book for a thousand words? There has to be a reason I crawled through nearly a thousand pages. I’ve set down other books that I’ve found disappointing or even offensive but I stuck through City. Why?

1977 starts (or 76 ends) with a crime that we expect to drive the story and surprise us in its resolution, only of course, much later. For a while I did want to know who was guilty. But, the narrative departed from the mystery too often and at too great a distance to keep me curious. The question of the book’s length has to come into play here. I’ve never shied from a heavy page count, the best ones go by faster than anything half their size, but I needed to be reminded in later chapters just who the victim was and why I should care about them. By the time I got near the end, my empathy faded.

Perspective does shift through the lives and viewpoints of its characters quickly enough to produce some momentum. We have the young punk rock grrl and victim of the crime, two children of the New York elite, their lovers in various states of abandonment, two villains fighting for the stage both in the reader’s eyes and with each other, and more than a few stray characters that each get a fairly random magnifying glass held over them at points in the story. An inability to fully commit to one of these lives leaves a lack of depth to them all. When the particularly shallow ones arrive the pace grinds down with them.

The plot swirls back and forth through decades but keeps as its flashpoints the crime on New Years Eve and the blackout of 77. Through such a swirl connections should be made and revealed, bells should ring and revelations had but really, they aren’t. If they were, I misjudged their weight. Everyone is connected and these links pop up often but they seem to be calling for recognition of their cleverness, not meaning.

When the ends of storylines appear frayed at best or completely unfinished I start to doubt myself. I’m sure I missed something, the author is too smart for that and I just wasn’t paying the right amount of attention. A reference must have been lost by some skipped required reading of my childhood. But in City I could trace the flaws through devices the author even flat out mentions. A gun goes off in the story. Another doesn’t. One is identified right out as Chekovian and the other ignored as such. But for however many times Chekov’s famous rule shows itself it is thusly broken. Or at least bent. Guns go off, just maybe at the wrong time. There are other unclear moments I can’t shake. One character may have died or may not have. I missed it. I guess that’s on me but still, how can that be blurry?

Before City’s release it’s weight and breadth drew comparisons to Don Delillo’s Underworld. City is not pure historical fiction and neither is Delillo’s masterpiece though the predecessor here runs its dueling plots along fragments of real events, tracing the motion of history. Hallberg uses events as fence posts to keep his story penned in.

Amongst the myriad things Delillo got right but City misses was the jumping timeline, the shift between decades not past to present or back again but a seemingly random but in fact orchestrated leap between epochs. Hallberg’s leaps land on shaky legs. He doesn’t tell his story in order, which is fine, but he gets the disorder wrong too. I don’t understand why he jumps from the 70’s to the 60’s to the later 70s and even the 80s and back again. Delillo moves to a particular decade because something that happened at that time represented to him the America he was trying to understand. Hallberg jumps to events his characters experienced in their earlier and later lives. When we don’t care about the characters, the foundation slips.

Even though the lights did go out in New York in 77, City is pure fiction set in the past. Underworld needed the times it took place in to achieve Delillo’s goal of understanding cold war America. Hallberg could set his story in nearly any generation and maintain the same plot lines. For his story 1970’s (and 60’s and 80's) New York is pure backdrop.

The book jacket promised explorations of the power of youthful discovery and rock n roll. This could have been what kept me going for over a month. But you better deliver if you’re claiming that hallowed mythology, Bro. Enter Charlie Weisbarger, far from the center of our story but maybe the most broken spoke on the wheel. His is a believable life of teenage confusion and anger drawn forth by his tutelage in the underground punk scene. We can believe in him. Charlie is an honest portrayal of a lost kid and I wanted something special for him separate from the other characters. He runs from the suburbs to the city following punk rock, and a girl, and finds himself twisted into evil undeserving of his blatant if not expected innocence. You kind of want him to be ok. In the end Hallberg portrays him honestly, not as a saint or a hero or even a victim, but realistically as an annoying and broken down kid. I nodded both to Charlie’s spirit quest and it’s ending. His counterparts in the story call him the Prophet and it could be said he grew into just this after his wounded and largely forgotten finish. Charlie was good. He should have made a bigger splash. He cried a lot and that was okay.

Charlie’s journeys through the East Village and Bowery are probably what kept me going. I wanted to see the neighborhood and learn something about it. I wanted to see a movement, a time, a generation, explained or symbolized by the art it created and I needed this done through a good story. A very, very tall order.

I hung on for the knockout Patti Smith reference. There were a few nods, and I’ll admit they weren’t terrible, but the story as a whole falls far short of a revealing picture of life in those times. Looking back to well over a year ago, I can’t recall now any of the hype promising the boiling inspiration that made Patty or the Ramones or Talking Heads take a stage. In the end I’ll have to take the blame for unrealized expectations.