City on Fire
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3.3 • 14 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A big-hearted, boundary-vaulting novel that heralds a remarkable new talent: set in 1970s New York, it is a story outsized in its generosity, warmth, and ambition, its deep feeling for its characters, and its exuberant imagination.
The individuals who live within this extraordinary first novel are: Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's largest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown's punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter; his idealistic neighbor; and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park. Their entangled relationships--which stretch from post-Vietnam youth culture to the fiscal crisis, from small-town Georgia to greater L.A.--open up the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the infamous blackout of July 13th, 1977 plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever. A novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock'n'roll, about how the people closest to us are sometimes the hardest to reach--about what it means to be human.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Thanks to this staggeringly creative debut novel, author Garth Risk Hallberg has been compared to Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. Hallberg's writing is cutting-edge, but his moving and mesmerising portrait of New York City in the ‘70s harkens back to 19th-century classics. With its Dickensian cast of characters and plot twists, City on Fire captures a gritty era at every level, from old money to the downtown punk scene—and every setting rings true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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, with a character's typed manuscript drafts (spill marks included), hand-written diaries, notebooks, photographs, cartoons, drawings, homework, and personal correspondence. A cast of characters drawn from all social strata features William Hamilton-Sweeney, artist and sometime heroin addict, once heir to a fortune, once lead guitarist for the post-humanist rock band Ex Post Facto; and Sam Cicciaro, the girl everyone finds irresistible, discovered half-dead in Central Park by William's lover, Mercer. The search to identify Sam's attacker is one of several story lines tying the ambitious work together; another is Mercer's attempt, propelled by William's sister, Regan, to bring William back into the family fold as their father's business collapses and troubles in the family mount. Charlie, an alienated teenager who becomes a rock band groupie, falls for Sam. Meanwhile Richard Kosgroth, veteran journalist and Capote wannabe, interviews Sam's father, New York's fireworks king. Seventies survivors will not be surprised when city residents come together during the '77 blackout. Readers wishing to wallow in cultural trivia will find much to savor in Hallberg's all-encompassing, occasionally overwritten effort, but others will be left to wonder how so much energy could generate so little light.
Customer Reviews
Too long, too drawn out, conclusion left out a lot
Too long, too drawn out, conclusion left out a lot. For the length of this book I was expecting a little more from the ending. Like a firework that you've been promised would amaze and dazzle you but kind of just went bang once