Simplicity was easier than precision

City on Fire is the second book in my quest this year to settle in and read loooooong works. I remember hearing about this 900+ page novel last fall when it came out, but didn’t really register much beyond “sprawling tale of NYC and the punk scene in the late 70’s” and the fact that this first-time author commanded a 2 million dollar advance. When I spied it on the first table at the bookstore a couple of weeks ago it was the heft of the thing that finally made me pick it up and I’ve been dragging it around ever since. Not only did I build a little muscle, this book sparked interesting conversations in coffee houses and bars. And as I toiled through the dense prose, I journeyed through admiration, frustration, apathy and back to a new kind of appreciation.
I don’t even know how to outline this book without creating a review of similar length and scope. There’s 3 generations of the upper-echelon rich family, the Hamilton-Sweeney’s at the core. There’s the punk scene, centered around the fictional band Ex Post Facto and a group that calls itself the Post Humanists. A tragic shooting on New Years Eve. A reporter doing a story on what is left of a family of Fireworkers that turns into an investigation of the shooting. A dogged inspector
detective on the eve of retirement.The blackout of July 13-14, 1977. And a whole bunch of other stuff.
Since finishing the novel, I have looked at reviews, which veer from fawning over it’s scope and wordsmithery, to outrage over it’s length and apparent lack of editing. And indeed, while I read this, I had similar responses at times. At first there was the wonder at the Hallberg’s command of the language. A couple of hundred pages in and, it seemed, just one new character and thread too many, that admiration was turning to “I get it, you had a big fancy education. But is this actually going anywhere and by the way can you give me characters I could give two shits about, please?” At the halfway mark, I was coming back around. I started thinking about the events and characters more and more when I wasn’t actually reading. Then the last 300 pages took on an urgency, deftly ratcheting up the tension and I found myself alternating between fevered racing through the city the night of the blackout and putting the book aside, wanting to stop and savor this just a little longer. Because this ambitious novel took me on such a journey and rewarded my tenacity, it gets 4 stars. I’ll be very interested to see where Mr. Hallberg goes from here.