An epic story about burning social issues that still affect us
Musical undercurrent hits on youthful exhilaration of not knowing how night ends
One of the biggest new names appearing at the International Festival of Authors is Garth Risk Hallberg whose first novel City On Fire is taking the world by storm.
To understand the allure, you need look no further than a recently soldout crowd at Toronto’s Design Exchange to hear the incomparable Patti Smith tell personal stories from her new memoir M Train.
Smith, the poetically minded matriarch of New York’s 1970s punk scene, is synonymous with the gritty toughness of that era, so it comes as no surprise that her music makes an appearance in Garth Risk Hallberg’s sprawling 944-page debut novel.
Like Smith before him, 36-year-old Hallberg came to New York to be among like-minded artists and writers. In 2003, while on a bus heading into the city, listening to Billy Joel’s ode to the Big Apple, “Miami 2017,” he had a vision for his novel.
“I knew this was the book I have to write,” he says.
For the next 10 years during offhours from his day job as a journalist, Hallberg created the world that would become City On Fire, an epic story that should resonate with those who actually hung out at CBGB and those who show their affinity by wearing vintage Ramones T-shirts.
Mostly set in 1977 prior to New York’s notorious blackout and subsequent violence, City On Fire revolves around the unsolved murder of an East Village teenager named Sam. The novel quickly introduces a large cast of characters, all of whom are tangibly connected, but whose personal dreams and socio-economic, political and sexual identities offer original perspectives on life in the city.
Since news of Hallberg’s novel grabbed attention for its publisher bidding war (Doubleday Canada publishes it here) and staggering nearly $2-million advance, City On Fire has been lumped into a spate of books and other media, such as Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming Netflix musical series, accused of misplaced nostalgia for a time when drugs, poverty and crime reigned.
But Hallberg says nostalgia is exactly what he was trying to avoid, “at least so far as it involves the flattening or sentimentalizing of the past,” he says.
While Hallberg “adores” books like Hillary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell tome Wolf Hall, he didn’t set out to write a historical novel, either. What he found in the squalor of 1970s New York was “a place where I could dramatize the burning issues that still affect us years later: class, sexuality, race, questions of humanity and selfexpression,” he says. “These are all very contemporary concerns.”
As he was writing the first draft and before any fact-checking, Hallberg realized he was already intuitively aware of so much of the story’s ethos. Growing up in North Carolina, he recalls listening as a small child to political conversations among the grown-ups. By the time he was 17, he had developed a group of friends five hours away in Washington, D.C., who introduced him to underground zine culture. Originally, he planned to dedicate a chapter in the book to Sam’s diary, but instead, readers get inside her thoughts via a scrappy cut-and-pasted zine.
“Sam is so much me. Her voice is mine,” Hallberg says.
And then there’s the music, which plays like an undercurrent throughout the book. All the touchstones, such as Smith, are there, but Hallberg, who performed in a band and boasts 18,000 songs on his iPod, captures that timeless youthful exhilaration of watching favourite bands in sweaty clubs, unsure of how the night is going to end.
“That’s the world where I grew up,” Hallberg says.