Review Book on New York City in the 1970s
Review: 'Urban center on Fire,' Garth Chance Hallberg's Novel of New York in the Bad Old Days
Garth Risk Hallberg'southward "City on Burn down" is a large, stunning first novel and an astonishing virtual reality machine, whisking u.s. back to New York Urban center in the 1970s, that gritty, graffitied era when the metropolis tottered on the brink of bankruptcy, when the Bronx was burning and Key Park was a shabby hunting ground for muggers, and the Son of Sam was roaming the streets. Punk stone was being born downtown and starving artists could withal rent garrets in Midtown. Vinyl was the music delivery system of choice, writers still wrote on typewriters, researchers relied on microfilm, and no one anyone knew had a cellphone.
Although Mr. Hallberg is but 36, he'southward somehow managed to evoke all this — and the cacophonous soundtrack that played in those years — with bravura swagger and style and heart. He captures the city's unsafe, magnetic attraction — for artists, for dreamers, for kids eager to escape the platitudes of bourgeoisie. And he also captures what it'due south like to be young in New York, propelled past the boundless adrenaline-rush of possibility and frightened, too, by the fragility of urgent ambitions.
The ghosts of New York memorialized by before writers — F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Richard Cost — hover over "Urban center on Burn." At the same time, the novel's ambition and Dickensian storytelling ardor volition remind many readers of Donna Tartt's dazzling 2013 novel, "The Goldfinch," while its fuel-injected prose and nimble stacking of plot complications volition recall for others Martin Amis's classic portrait of Gotham in "Money." But this novel is defiantly and indelibly Mr. Hallberg'southward ain: a symphonic epic — centered on the shooting of a suburban teenage girl in Central Park on New Year's Eve — that reaches a crashing crescendo during the blackout of July thirteen, 1977. The book, with its flashbacks and wink-forwards, likewise illuminates the long-range trajectory of both the city and the novel's characters every bit the AIDS crisis, the Sept. eleven attacks and the financial crunch of 2008 loom as distant thunderclouds on the horizon.
For Mr. Hallberg, the '70s were a sort of inflection signal for New York — when its fate seemed as bleak as Detroit'southward would be decades later, and before a bubble of wealth encased much of the city. And his youthful characters, besides, are at pivotal moments in their lives.
Prototype
Some struggle to get out from under the umbrella of their parents' expectations and balance the equation between their dreams of artistic success and the numbing day-to-day reality of existence ignored and poor. Others, slightly older, are trying to navigate their way through the maze of marriage and the new reality of beingness parents themselves. The public and the private, the political and the personal are intimately connected in "City on Fire," braided together past Mr. Hallberg then that characters' inner conflicts are mirrored by the tumult in the streets, and their self-doubts reverberate larger, communal suspicions that the centre cannot hold, that things are indeed falling autonomously.
Samantha Cicciaro, the teenager left for dead in Central Park, is the fulcrum of this novel's plot, but she is just one actor in a sprawling ensemble cast. Sam and her friend Charlie Weisbarger, we learn, accept been hanging out with a group of anarchists and punk rockers downtown, presided over by the nihilistic Nicky Chaos. Sam has also been having an affair with a Wall Street trader named Keith Lamplighter, the estranged husband of Regan, an heir to the corking Hamilton-Sweeney fortune and the estranged sister of William Hamilton-Sweeney 3, an emotionally withholding musician and painter, who himself is the estranged boyfriend of Mercer, an aspiring novelist who, like many a bildungsroman hero before him, has left a pocket-sized boondocks to move to New York to try to write the Bully American Novel.
Like Mercer, Mr. Hallberg believes in "the old thought" that the novel might "teach u.s. about something. Near everything." And he seems to desire to make his ain magnum opus "every bit big as life," encompassing the urban center in all its gradations and complexities, and one family unit's shared longings and grievances as they are handed down 1 generation to the next. As well big at times: "City on Fire" tin occasionally feel overmarinated in research (the author having seemingly inhaled whole books like "Love Goes to Buildings on Burn down," Will Hermes's terrific portrait of the New York music scene in the mid-70s), and the reader tin't help feeling that a few judicious nips and tucks might have dispersed the longueurs that waft around the third quarter of the book.
Still, such flaws are easily steamrollered past the velocity of Mr. Hallberg's narrative and his assurance at drawing upon his XXL tool kit as a storyteller: a love of language and the handsprings he can make it perform; a bone-deep cognition of his characters' inner lives that'south equally unerring as that of the young Salinger; an instinctive gift for spinning suspense not merely out of dovetailing plotlines and odd Dickensian coincidences but besides from secrets buried in his characters' pasts.
He also possesses a journalistic eye for those telling details that can trigger memories of the reader'southward ain like small Proustian grenades — playing cards clothespinned to bicycle spokes and "the sulfur trails of sparklers" on a suburban summer nighttime; yellowed ski-lift passes clipped to the zippers of old down jackets; those Neapolitan chocolate-strawberry-vanilla water ice creams, eaten and savored, carefully, color stripe past color.
"City on Fire" traverses the suburbs and boroughs of New York with the same audacity with which information technology premises from shiny penthouses to squalid squats, from uptown costume galas to grungy downtown clubs, from high-finance offices to bearding swoop bars. It zooms into its heroes' heads to give us up-close-and-personal emotional forensics reports, then zooms out to requite us seraphic, panoramic vistas of the city. Despite being overstuffed, it'south a novel of head-snapping ambition and eye-stopping ability — a novel that attests to its immature author's boundless and unflagging talents.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/books/review-city-on-fire-garth-risk-hallbergs-novel-of-new-york-in-the-bad-old-days.html
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