To cut unceremoniously to the chase, yes, as you might suspect, or fear, Garth Risk Hallberg’s new, much promoted, nine-hundred-and-forty-four-page novel, “City on Fire” (Knopf), is about four hundred pages too long. Hallberg is a gifted writer, so the pages go by pleasurably. His book is never flaccid or flat, but it does not leave you wishing for more. He tried to squeeze too much juice out of the apple.
“City on Fire” is basically a detective story, from a recipe that goes back to Dickens: an apparently random event—in this case, the shooting of a punky N.Y.U. student named Samantha in Central Park on New Year’s Eve—turns out to be a thread that, when pulled, unravels a web of intrigue that stretches from a midtown office tower to an abandoned building in the East Village. The novel features a dozen or so characters from varied walks of New York life—a cop, a reporter, a schoolteacher, a punk rocker, a fireworks-maker, an assistant in a gallery, an investment banker, and so on. As the secrets are revealed, each of them turns out to be one degree of separation or less from the others.
It’s all highly implausible, of course. Contrary to what newcomers to the city may imagine, New York is a place where circles almost never intersect, except transactionally—at co-op meetings and parent-teacher conferences, or on jury duty. New Yorkers circulate mostly within their own class and occupational orbits. Manhattan is a hundred small towns unevenly distributed over some twenty-two square miles of city space.
But the genre that “City on Fire” belongs to requires a suspension of disbelief on this point. Implausibility is part of the design. The plots of Dickens’s big “condition of England” novels are implausible in the same way. In the London of “Bleak House,” a connection between Lady Dedlock and Jo the street-sweeper didn’t have even a transactional basis. The aim of these novels is not to mimic actual city life, where people tend to be like hamsters in their own cages. It’s to dramatize a hidden interdependence, to show that we are all, each according to our abilities, turning the same big socioeconomic wheel inside the same spatiotemporal cage.
The spatiotemporal cage in “City on Fire” is New York in the nineteen-seventies. The main action takes us from Christmas, 1976, to July 13, 1977, the night of the New York City blackout. (The night, to be precise, of the second New York City blackout; the first was in 1965. A third blackout happened in 2003.) The book opens with a bang. The setup, introducing the main characters and ending with the shooting and the start of the police investigation, is expertly handled on every level: characterization, setting, pace, suspense. It takes up only a hundred and thirty-one pages.
Then the backstories start. There are also flash-forwards, plus several “interludes,” consisting of documents printed in a variety of fonts (a New Wave zine, the typescript of a magazine piece, an artist’s notebook). In all, the novel has six of these interludes, ninety-four chapters, a prologue, and a postscript. Relationships get reshuffled and a lot of family history accumulates, but the book has just the one plot. The style is naturalistic—no Pynchonian flights of fancy—with some bravura passages (inside the mind of someone on heroin, for instance) and bits of life wisdom appropriate to the characters’ personalities and perspectives.
It’s rude to speculate about an author’s motives, so let’s just say it’s as thoughHallberg had had an idea for a great, “Chinatown”-like whodunit about New York but felt some sort of ethical or professional duty to turn the book into an art novel. (In fact, although “City on Fire” is being advertised as Hallberg’s first novel, he has published an art novel, “A Field Guide to the North American Family,” a cross-indexed mixture of prose and photographs.) Hallberg has the talent to bring a character to life in a few pages, and that’s really all he needs for the purposes of his plot. The backstories and the rest iterate more than they complicate.
Another reason for the length is an overreliance on the technique known as free indirect style—the focalization of the narrative through the mind and voice of a character. It’s a great device for representing experience from the inside, but it carves the world into a series of perspectives. Here is the first paragraph of the first chapter:
A Christmas tree was coming up Eleventh Avenue. Or rather, was trying to come; having tangled itself in a shopping cart someone had abandoned in the crosswalk, it shuddered and bristled and heaved, on the verge of bursting into flame. Or so it seemed to Mercer Goodman as he struggled to salvage the tree’s crown from the battered mesh of the cart. Everything these days was on the verge. Across the street, char-marks marred the loading dock where local bedlamites built fires at night. The hookers who sunned themselves there by day were watching now through dime-store shades, and for a second Mercer was acutely aware of how he must appear: a corduroyed and bespectacled brother doing his best to backpedal, while at the far end of the tree, a bedheaded whiteboy in a motorcycle jacket tried to yank the trunk forward and to hell with the shopping cart. Then the signal switched from don’t walk to walk, and miraculously, through some combination of push-me and pull-you, they were free again.
It’s a nicely crafted curtain-raiser. It signals a time (the de-institutionalized homeless—the “bedlamites”—began showing up on the streets in 1965; the walk/don’t walk signs got phased out starting in 2000) and a place (Eleventh Avenue loading docks plus prostitutes equals Hell’s Kitchen), and it introduces two major characters. Mercer is a nerdy African-American from Georgia who teaches in a private school for girls in the Village, loves nineteenth-century novels like “Lost Illusions” and “The Red and the Black,” and is trying to write a novel of his own (not, as it turns out, this one). His boyfriend, William, is the estranged scion of a banking family, an ex-punk-band leader, public-restroom cruiser, and heroin addict. He is trying to finish a painting.
But the “lens” on the encounter in a crosswalk between a Christmas tree and an empty shopping cart (a tidy image of economic dissonance) is Mercer. Everything in the scene is as he sees it and thinks it. “Bedlamite,” an obsolete Britishism, is there because it’s a word that a literary guy like Mercer would know. Even the description of Mercer is Mercer’s description. Every chapter is in this mode. We get the picture from one point of view at a time. There are few wide-angle shots. The story is assembled in slices.
Hallberg has an M.F.A. from N.Y.U. and lives in New York, but he was born in Louisiana, grew up in North Carolina, went to college in Missouri, and was not alive in the nineteen-seventies. To a person who did live in New York in the nineteen-seventies—to wit, this person—his powers of evocation are uncanny. Hell’s Kitchen, the Bowery, Central Park West, the subway, the L.I.R.R.—it’s as though he’d once walked those streets, ridden those cars.
He acknowledges the help of several books on New York, including Ken Auletta’s classic “The Streets Were Paved with Gold,” published in 1979, and Jonathan Mahler’s more recent “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.” Slips are minimal. (The tag of the pioneer graffiti artist Taki was Taki 183, not Taki 8, for instance.) But “City on Fire” is not overstuffed with period detail. It’s not that kind of historical novel.
There is virtually no mention of the Yankees, for instance, although they won the World Series in 1977, under the guidance of the thin-skinned sourball Billy Martin, or the campaign for mayor, at the end of which, to the dismay of liberals, Ed Koch defeated Mario Cuomo. Son of Sam, then known as “the .44-calibre killer,” is not in the book, although he killed five people between January and July, 1977, and was finally captured that August.
It’s not the facts that bring the nineteen-seventies to life in “City on Fire.” What Hallberg is after is an atmosphere, and he gets it. He gets the assaultive feeling the city had in those bombed-out years. He gets the ubiquitous defacement of public surfaces, the shuttered shops and derelict street people, the soul-destroying round-the-clock noise. His New York is a city that never sleeps not because there’s always more fun to be had but because it has insomnia.
But he is (like Dickens) a romantic about human nature. “City on Fire” will probably be compared with Tom Wolfe’s big, class-intersecting novel about New York in the nineteen-eighties, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You read it here first that this would be a mistake. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” as the allusion to Thackeray tells us, is a satire. “City on Fire” is not remotely satirical. The good guys are truly good, or, at least, they have honorable intentions and suffer remorse when they fall short. The few characters who are without a conscience had tough childhoods. The system is not to blame, it seems, nor is human folly. It’s just that some people manage to transcend their family mess (every family in the novel is some sort of mess), and some can’t, in which case they might deal with their pain by doing bad things, like burning down the South Bronx.
Hallberg is also a romantic about the nineteen-seventies. That may seem a strange species of nostalgia. The decade between 1972 and 1982 was the worst extended economic period since the nineteen-thirties. There were two oil crises, the first in 1973, when the price of a barrel nearly quadrupled, and the second in 1978-79, when it tripled. The stock market crashed in grim slow motion. Between 1972 and 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost half its value, and the market did not get back to 1972 levels until 1982. In 1975, unemployment jumped to 8.5 per cent. The inflation rate exceeded ten per cent. By late 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected President, the prime rate was twenty per cent.
In New York, it was the same only worse. From 1970 to 1976, the city lost more than six hundred thousand jobs. By 1976, unemployment stood at eleven per cent, and one in every seven New Yorkers was on welfare. The city was broke and had to be bailed out. “ford to city: drop dead” was the famous Daily Newsheadline, but Ford did not in fact say those words, and Congress eventually provided the financial assistance the city needed to climb back out of the red.
The price for that aid was austerity measures, and the reduction in city services, as well as poor decisions about things like the allocation of firehouses, led to areas of the city, like the Lower East Side and the South Bronx, becoming wastelands of drugs, abandoned buildings, muggings, robberies, and arson. Signs of blight were everywhere, a kind of urban eczema.
New York felt empty—there were so many parts of it where people didn’t want to go—and out of control. It was the time of broken windows. But, in part because of the collapse, the city also felt open, liberated, available. Anything seemed possible, especially to people who didn’t have much to begin with—avant-garde artists and performers, New Wave musicians, experimental writers, advanced students of the society of the spectacle. It wasn’t quite Saint-Germain-des-Prés after 1945 or Berlin after 1989, but Manhattan in the nineteen-seventies had a kind of locally grown cultural magnetism.
The piece of the downtown subculture that Hallberg takes on is the music scene. It was centered on two clubs, C.B.G.B., at Bowery and Bleecker, and the renovated Max’s Kansas City, on Park Avenue South. Those clubs were where groups like the Ramones, Television, and Blondie—groups at first known only by word of mouth—performed. It cost a dollar to see the Ramones at C.B.G.B. (You had to pay for drinks.)
The main downtown characters in “City on Fire” are the members of a punk band called Ex Nihilo and assorted hangers-on. The most successful of these is Charlie, a geeky Long Island teen-ager who is making the difficult taste transition from David Bowie to Patti Smith. To the extent that “City on Fire” is a novel of education, like the nineteenth-century novels that Mercer is obsessed with, Charlie is the hero. As a detective story, though, the book has two main actors: the leader of Ex Nihilo, who uses the stage name Nicky Chaos, and his uptown counterpart, Amory Gould, a businessman who has a scheme to make money from urban blight and might require a little surreptitious help with the blight part.
Nicky is a practitioner of the Situationist art of negation. He is a firebug who collects Herb Alpert records and talks about Marx and Nietzsche. He describes himself as a “post-Humanist,” and says things like “Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom—not when someone is framing the choices for you,” and, “This is the ’70s now, the death trip, the destruction trip, the internal contradictions rumbling and grumbling, the return of the repressed. It’s the system, having swallowed everything, having indigestion.”
He also says, “No more art. No more trying to change the culture with culture.” He’s a revolutionary who thinks that people won’t rise up unless their lives get materially worse. Underlying his arrangement with Amory is a bet over whether increasing the blight will bring on class warfare or simply hasten redevelopment.
The climax of the novel is set during the blackout. July 13, 1977, was a very hot day. At 8:37 p.m., during a thunderstorm, power lines in Westchester carrying electricity to the city’s grid were hit by lightning. Con Ed was unprepared to cope with the demand, there were more lightning strikes and a chain reaction, and by 9:36 p.m. all five boroughs (except for portions of Queens) and a few northern suburbs were without electricity.
The looting and arson began almost immediately. It was twenty-five hours before power was restored, and by then a thousand serious fires had broken out, more than fifteen hundred businesses had been looted or set on fire, and thirty-seven hundred people had been arrested. Rioters did not touch upscale businesses on the Upper East Side or, for the most part, in midtown. They looted and burned the mom-and-pop stores and bodegas in their own neighborhoods. About half of those arrested were unemployed, but this meant that about half were not. It was a frenzy of self-destruction.
Hallberg’s blackout is a (hundred-and-twenty-page) Walpurgisnacht of rage, craziness, and anarchy, but he also treats it as one of those suspensions of the conditions of ordinary life that allow things, under cover of chaos, to sort themselves out. By the next day, the mystery of the shooting has been solved and the web of intrigue revealed, and the dozen or so characters, having been brought together, now begin to separate, off to fresh treadmills in cages new.
The rioting killed any Situationist dreams of a new Commune. As the writer Luc Sante, then a graduate student living on the Lower East Side, later put it, “The looters were exemplary Americans, whose immediate impulse in a crisis was to see to the acquisition of consumable goods. They had no interest in power. Neither did anyone I knew. We just wanted power to go away.” The blackout did not kill the arts scene, though. The damaging blow came in 1981, at the very end of that rough decade, with the first signs of the aids epidemic.
It may strike some readers as a little odd to find that the novel’s sympathies seem to lie, ultimately, with the uptown businesspeople, and not with the punks. Amory was right: the recession may have driven many middle-class families out of the city, but it was a great business opportunity. One cause of the arson was landlords choosing to burn their buildings for the insurance. This meant that there was plenty of distressed property, all over the city, for bold speculators to snap up.
That’s how Donald Trump got his start. In 1974, when he was twenty-eight and had never built a thing in Manhattan, he set out to acquire property owned by the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. One of those pieces was the Grand Commodore Hotel, on Forty-second Street, next to Grand Central. According to Trump’s account, in his first book, “The Art of the Deal” (required reading for those of us preparing for a Trump Presidency), he got the city to agree to let him pay taxes on the property based on its assessed value in 1975. Trump renovated the hotel, and, in 1980, it reopened as the Grand Hyatt. The tax abatement was good for forty years, and is estimated to have been worth sixty million dollars in its first decade.
A great number of the jobs lost between 1970 and 1976 were manufacturing jobs. The city was going through a painful and inadequately planned-for transition from an economy based on manufacturing to one based on financial services. It needed the markets to recover, but, when they did, all the amenities of urban professional life recovered with them. Gentrification drove the S.R.O.s out and real-estate values up. The old Times Square, a squalid realm of peep shows and B movies, was turned into Disney World Manhattan.
Upscale New Yorkers today may complain about the gentrification and the commodification and the tourists. But not many of those people would have lasted long in the city of 1975. They would have found it so unhealthy. People smoked in restaurants and did not clean up after their dogs. Forget about cell phones and Wi-Fi; most people didn’t even have cable. If you parked your car on the street, someone would steal the radio. There were no espresso bars in the nineteen-seventies, no Mario Batali or David Chang or Dan Barber. There was Chock full o’ Nuts, and people ate in places like Lüchow’s and Mama Leone’s, huge barns of fat and cholesterol. Gyms were for pumping iron, not for doing Pilates. No one had ever heard of Pilates.
It was another era, remote not just in time but in spirit, and now that we know how it all came out it’s nice to have a book that brings a little of it back. You can always close a book
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