City on Fire: A novel
Garth Risk Hallberg's debut is set in New York during the July 1977 blackout, tracking a shooting in Central Park through punk kids, detectives, heirs, and hangers-on. The city is the real protagonist: broke, violent, electrically unpredictable. Hallberg is good on the textures of the period—the graffiti, the bankruptcy, the humidity before the lights go out—and less good at knowing when to stop. The novel wants to be Dickens in the East Village, and sometimes succeeds. It is long, occasionally self-indulgent, and unapologetic about both.Knopf published it as a substantial hardcover, the kind of first novel that arrives with expectations attached. Whether it meets them depends on how much patience the reader has for city-as-character maximalism, and on whether the reader believes a blackout is a fitting metaphor for a novel.
