City on Fire

I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we'll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky.

Here's the thing about City on Fire: When I heard that author Garth Risk Hallberg had been given a $2 million deal for his first novel – that the movie rights had been sold before the book was even finished – I went into reading this with a super critical eye; I think I wanted to dislike it just on principle. But on the page I couldn't dislike it and had to admire the book's scope and ambition, the line-by-line flourishes, the fitting love letter to NYC at its lowest point (FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD). This isn't a perfect book, and I do have some complaints, but I can't deny that City on Fire is an incredibly interesting read. What more would I want? 

City on Fire starts with a section that briefly describes a period between Christmas and New Year's Eve of 1976/77, and ends with a mysterious shooting in Central Park that marks an intersection of all the major characters of the book. This is followed by the first of six “interludes” (in this case, a handwritten letter from a father to his estranged son in 1961; later interludes will include a punk-centered zine, fragments of a magazine article, and documents written in 2003 – outside the timeline of the book but dangling fragments before we see them for the first time in the actual narrative, all very Night Film) and then the plot rewinds, with the next section covering events from 1961-1976. Thus does the story move forward and back, creating mysteries and filling in blanks, and leading to the concluding timeframe of July 13-14, 1977; the time of NYC's infamous blackout and the looting, destruction, and violence that that night saw.

But NYC had been burning long before that night. One of City on Fire's subplots centers on the nascent punk scene, and we meet several of the rockers and their teenage fans. The book's title comes from the lyrics of a song performed by Ex Post Facto, headed by the angry junkie (and secret rich boy) Billy Three-Sticks:

City on fire, city on fire
One is a gas, two is a match
and we too are a city on fire

Another subplot follows Billy's (or, rather, William Hamilton-Sweeney III's) ultrarich family though the years, and we watch as his evil step-uncle Amory (known disaffectionately as the Demon Brother or the Ghoul) insinuates himself into the levers of power behind the family firm; a position from which he profits from NYC's decline, and therefore, its redevelopment:

You'd be surprised how swiftly you can have a Blight Zone declared, once a neighbourhood gets sufficiently torched.

Outside of these major plots (and the many characters who inhabit them) are the observers trying to make sense of it all: Mercer is a gay Black man from the south, come to New York to experience life and write the Great American Novel; Jenny is a Vietnamese-American, come to New York from California to Make a Difference; Pulaski is a Deputy Inspector with the NYPD, crippled by childhood polio and nearing retirement, he's in charge of the Central Park shooting but not really expected to solve it; and Richard is a dissolute journalist who has an epiphany about the angle that would tie the great story of NYC together:

History, scenery, fate, impermanence, disaster, politics, the city, all packed into a single shell, awaiting combustion. Music made visible: fireworks.

With the fireworks thread, we can go back and talk about America's Bicentennial and the mob and the corruption in the awarding of public works contracts and the decline of family businesses – this book has everything. But at nearly a thousand pages, does it have too much? Here's where my complaints come in.

Maybe it's a symptom of swinging for the fences with a first novel, but Hallberg seems to have put all of his ideas in this book. I don't mind an author going over my head sometimes, but I missed so many of Hallberg's allusions as he wrote about Steering between the Scylla of too-much and the Charybdis of not-enough or Back when he'd still believed life moved in Freytag lines or The Lachesis gesture of measuring something out to have it cut off; even in context, and even though these terms seemed vaguely familiar, I was constantly shrugging off the metaphors. And while I appreciate that the leader of the punks, Nicky Chaos, was trying to use philosophy to justify anarchy and that that made it organic (and sometimes funny) for him to talk about ontological this or dialectical that, Hallberg constantly used idiosyncratic vocabulary, dropping words like clinamen or stochasm on every other page. I don't like to feel dumb while reading fiction (who does?) and this not only took me out of the story but it made Hallberg's hovering presence a sneering one.

On the other hand, I recently read in some book that authors should avoid the urge to make verbs out of nouns, but I consistently enjoyed Hallberg's touch at this:

Nicky watched every session, seemingly without blinking, gargoyling forward from his perch atop an amp.

At least there weren't newswagons everywhere, sinking into the slushy lawn, klieging up the siding, waiting to endow with sinister significance images of its last remaining occupant checking his mail.

The rapid chomp of typewriter keys, like a school of piranhas skeletonizing a cow.

And when I would understand a metaphor, it often made me laugh out loud (okay, I do understand my inconsistency with this):

By the time the ball, that descended monorchid, goes dark above Times Square, the last masses have drained underground.

So where does all that leave me as a reader? City on Fire is long and some of the characters felt superfluous: I didn't get that much from Carmine or Jenny or Pulaski or “Dr” Zig, but they did serve as observers and interpreters, I suppose. On the other hand, I found it strange that I only recall one reference to the Son of Sam and found it even stranger that Charlie referred to the Summer of Sam – as in the title of Spike Lee's movie about David Berkowitz and this same time frame – when Charlie meant the peak of his friendship with Samantha; especially odd to not include more of the Son of Sam when he was apparently also a prolific firebug. There were also many references to the World Trade Center buildings in this book – including the observation that the red lights atop the twin towers and the fictional Hamilton-Sweeney Building were the only visible lights during the blackout, and surely that can't be true? Wouldn't the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, et al have had emergency power to their aircraft warning lights? – and the references were numerous enough to imply significance: so am I to infer that on the mornings of July 14th 1977 and September 12th 2001, New Yorkers awoke to the exact same experience? While the feelings of disbelief, insecurity and the vow to rebuild must have been similar, I don't know if I can conflate an attack from within with one from without. And in the bigger picture, it would seem that the ultimate point of this book is that New York City itself is too big to fail, and despite every novel that fetishises it or every song that mythologises it, as a non-New Yorker, I don't entirely buy the premise (I'm sure the same has been said in the past of Detroit, and in the end, it was just a city, too). By the very end of City on Fire, I was growing a little bored of all the introspection indulged in by all the characters; the constant references to birds and the way they would assemble in larger and more menacing flocks as time went by flew literally over my head; and in the end, I resented the lack of justice: no one is held accountable for the shooting; no one pays a price for infidelity; even the Demon Brother slips away.

And yet...despite the challenging allusions and vocabulary and the excessive length and the plot points that made me roll my eyes, City on Fire was consistently interesting and so many of the characters were fully fleshed out and sympathetic and it kept me reading and engaged. Worth two million bucks? Who am I to say? It's certainly worth the cover price and every stellated point of four stars.

While reading City on Fire, I was put in mind of movies more than other books: certainly Summer of Sam as I said in the review, but even moreso, The Warriors. I remember that The Warriors was still a cult favourite when I was in high school -- it was widely considered the coolest Halloween costume ever when some guys came to the school dance dressed as Baseball Furies -- and Dave and I showed the girls a dvd of the movie a few years ago. Unlike the ribbing they have given us for some of the lame old movies we've made them watch, they both agreed that there's something cool and campy about this gang trying to cross all of Manhattan and make it back alive to their Coney Island base while the lawless and broken NYC of 1979 pulsed malevolently all around them. They saw this movie some years after we had taken them to NYC, so I'm sure they had a hard time connecting the filth and danger of the film to the family-friendly Broadway and Times Square that we walked at night.

Last month as we were having dinner one Saturday night, Kennedy asked, "You remember tonight's the night I'm taking you out for a surprise, right?"

I hadn't remembered. After dinner, we got into Kennedy's car and drove to Waterloo, pulling up in front of the Apollo Theater. Turns out she had bought a groupon for a night out there and had chosen to take me to see...The Warriors.

The theater is newly refurbished (apparently with seats from the famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre) and the rows are wide and comfy, and where we sat in the back, there were even tables for people to hold their beers (though we had pop as Kennedy couldn't drink and drive). There was a big turnout for the movie and it was much fun to watch in a crowd; fun to giggle along at the campiest bits (caaaaan yooouuu diiiig it?)

We LOVE this guy!

One other thing I want to mention: when I finished reading City on Fire, I started reading about other things online (Patti Smith and the punk scene, Son of Sam, etc.), and at the end of the wikipedia entry on the NYC blackout, it noted that during the looting of that night, so many Black people stole expensive stereo equipment and mixing boards and whatnot that that led directly to the rise of Hip Hop and scratching, etc. That's a fascinating cause and effect to me, and I hope it's not considered a racist observation because there's something justifiably redistributative to this idea -- I almost wish that Hallberg had been able to work it in; it's pretty much what his punks were calling for all along.