City on Fire (Hallberg) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[A] big, stunning first novel and an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s…with bravura swagger and style and heart. [Hallberg] captures the city's dangerous, magnetic allure—for artists, for dreamers, for kids eager to escape the platitudes of suburbia. And he also captures what it's like to be young in New York, propelled by the dizzying adrenaline-rush of possibility and frightened, too, by the fragility of urgent ambitions…The ghosts of New York memorialized by earlier writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Richard Price—hover over City on Fire…But this novel is defiantly and indelibly Mr. Hallberg's own: a symphonic epic…drawing upon his XXL tool kit as a storyteller: a love of language and the handsprings he can make it perform; a bone-deep knowledge of his characters' inner lives that's as unerring as that of the young Salinger; an instinctive gift for spinning suspense not just out of dovetailing plotlines and odd Dickensian coincidences but also from secrets buried in his characters' pasts…[City on Fire is] a novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power—a novel that attests to its young author's boundless and unflagging talents.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


The question of whether City on Fire is good does not lend itself to a glib answer. But no one can say it isn't ambitious, and exceptionally so for a first novel. Hallberg devotes more than 900 pages to his own effort to recreate the face of an entire city in all its confounding complexity, complete with collagelike inserts replicating a coffee-stained manuscript by one character and the dense East Village zines of another. His talent is as conspicuous as the book's heft. There's rarely a less than finely honed sentence or a moment when you don't feel that a sophisticated intelligence is at work. Hallberg expertly manages the gear-shifting of multiple narratives and time frames (some back stories date to 1960) while keeping his present-tense New York in sharp relief…Hallberg delivers a fresh vision of New York that is more dreamscape than reportage.
Frank Rich - New York Times Book Review


Dazzling.... City on Fire is an extraordinary performance.... Hallberg inhabits the minds of whites and blacks, men and women, old and young, gay and straight with equal fidelity . . . making every one of them thrum with real life.... And what endlessly fascinating characters they are!.... [The novel’s] Whitmanesque arms embrace an entire city of lovers and strivers, saints and killers.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


To a person who did live in New York in the nineteen-seventies—to wit, this person—Hallberg’s powers of evocation are uncanny.... 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.
Louis Menand - The New Yorker


Thrilling...brings gritty 1970s Manhattan to life.... A kind of punk Bleak House.... An exuberant, Zeitgeisty New York novel, like The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Emperor’s Children, or The Goldfinch.
Vogue


Garth Risk Hallberg has written the kind of debut novel that only comes around once every 20 years or so—one that everyone who’s read it roots for.... An edge-of-your-seat epic, which is as tightly told as it is ambitious.
Elle


It’s hard to believe this layered New York epic is a debut: The glitter and grime of the city’s punk heyday are captured in gorgeous detail as multiple stories converge.
Entertainment Weekly


A soaring debut.... Over the course of Hallberg’s magisterial epic, distinctions of class, race, geography, and generation give way to an impression of the human condition that is both ambitious and sublime.
Vanity Fair


Hallberg’s maniacally detailed, exhaustingly clever depiction of 1970s New York is packed with urban angst, intellectual energy, and sinister pitfalls, much like the city it evokes. This epic of drugs, sex, and rock and roll combines fiction and new journalistic accounts of real events.... [An] occasionally overwritten effort, but others will be left to wonder how so much energy could generate so little light.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) This epic, well-written, and highly entertaining first novel is set in New York City from around Christmas 1976 to the blackout of July 1977.... Throughout, Hallberg expertly handles the multiple shifts in perspective, vibrantly portraying a specific time and place and creating memorable characters—especially Charlie and Regan, a complicated mess of a poor little rich girl who manages to be heroic in her own way—all wandering the vast, ongoing American dreamscape that is New York City. —James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Completely engrossing.... This magnificent first novel is full to bursting with plot, character, and emotion, all set within an exquisitely grungy 1970s New York City.... Graceful in execution, hugely entertaining, and most concerned with the longing for connection, a theme that reaches full realization during the blackout of 1977, this epic tale is both a compelling mystery and a literary tour de force.
Booklist


Engrossing.... When the city goes dark, [it] is like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Manhattan edition.... As in the fiction of Saul Bellow, Hallberg’s heroes are theorists of their own universe.... Every ley line is a life story, every subplot a window on a New York niche . . . The story itself is dramatic, intermixing a police procedural with a terrorist plot, an addiction plot, an art plot, various adultery plots.... The result is a narrative that is immense.
Bookforum


(Starred review.) Rough-edged mid-1970s New York provides the backdrop for an epic panorama of musicians, writers, and power brokers and the surprising ways they connect.... [T]his novel becomes an ambitious showpiece for just how much the novel can contain without busting apart. The very-damn-good American novel.
Kirkus Reviews