Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

A big-hearted, boundary-vaulting novel that heralds a remarkable new talent: set in 1970s New York, a story outsized in its generosity, warmth, and ambition, its deep feeling for its characters, 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.

Published by Knopf, September 2015

IN NEW YORK,you can get anything delivered. Such, anyway, is the principle I’m operating on. It’s the middle of summer, the middle of life. I’m in an otherwise deserted apartment on West Sixteenth Street, listening to the placid hum of the fridge in the next room, and though it contains only a mesozoic half-stick of butter my hosts left behind when they took off for the shore, in forty minutes I can be eating more or less whatever I can imagine wanting. When I was a young man — younger, I should say — you could even order in drugs. Business cards stamped with a 212 number and that lonesome word, delivery , or, more usually, some bullshit about therapeutic massage. I can’t believe I ever forgot this.

Then again, it’s a different city now, or people want different things. The bushes that screened hand-to-hand transactions in Union Square are gone, along with the payphones you’d use to dial your dealer. Yesterday afternoon, when I walked over there for a break, modern dancers were making a slo-mo commotion beneath the revitalized trees. Families sat orderly on blankets, in wine-colored light. I keep seeing this stuff everywhere, public art hard to distinguish from public life, polka-dot cars idling down on Canal, newsstands ribboned like gifts. As if dreams themselves could be laid out like options on the menu of available experience. Oddly, though, what this rationalizing of every last desire tends to do, the muchness of this current city’s muchness, is remind you that what you really hunger for is nothing you’re going to find out there.

What I’ve personally been hungering for, since I arrived six weeks ago, is for my head to feel a certain way. At the time, I couldn’t have put the feeling into words, but now I think it is something like the sense that things might still at any moment change.

I was a native son once — jumper of turnstiles, dumpster diver, crasher on strange roofs downtown — and this feeling was the ground-note of my life. These days, when it comes, it is only in flashes. Still, I’ve agreed to house-sit this apartment through September, hoping that will be enough. It’s shaped like a stackable block from a primitive video game: bedroom and parlor up front, then dining area and master bedroom, the kitchen coming off like a tail. As I wrestle at the dining table with these prefatory remarks, twilight is deepening outside high windows, making the ashtrays and documents heaped before me seem like someone else’s.

By far my favorite spot, though, is back past the kitchen and through a side door — a porch, on stilts so high this might as well be Nantucket. Timbers of park-bench green, and below, a carpet of leaves from two spindly gingkos. “Courtyard” is the word I keep wanting to use, though “airshaft” might also work; tall apartment houses wall in the space so no one else can reach it. The white bricks across the way are flaking, and on evenings when I’m ready to give up on my project altogether, I come out instead to watch the light climb and soften as the sun descends another rainless sky. I let my phone tremble in my pocket and watch the shadows of branches reach toward that blue distance across which a contrail, fattening, drifts. The sirens and traffic noises and radios floating over from the avenues are like the memories of sirens and traffic noises and radios. Behind the windows of other apartments, TVs come on, but no one bothers to draw the blinds. And I start to feel once more that the lines that have boxed in my life — between past and present, outside and in — are dissolving. That I may yet myself be delivered.

There’s nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn’t here in 1977; maybe it’s not this year, but that one, and everything that follows is still to come. Maybe a Molotov cocktail is streaking through the dark, maybe a magazine journalist is racing through a graveyard; maybe the fireworker’s daughter remains perched on a snow-covered bench, keeping her lonely vigil. For if the evidence points to anything, it’s that there is no one, unitary City. Or if there is, it’s the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can’t help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I’m feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren’t you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn’t still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us — if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks — is ready even now to give up hope?

A CHRISTMAS TREEwas 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.