City on Fire author’s dream-like novella shows a fascination with everyday life

Young New York writer Garth Risk Hallberg pulled off a major coup in 2015.

The film rights to his novel, City on Fire, were picked up by the Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin for nearly $2m before he’d signed a book deal.

City on Fire, set in and around Manhattan’s punk scene in the mid-1970s, was an overnight bestseller that turned Hallberg

(below) into the most hyped writer of the year.

More astonishingly, the novel itself, clocking in at just over 900 pages, is a work of genuine brilliance, with Hallberg’s relentless gifts gleaming off every page.

Following a cast of characters from various echelons of New York society, the story spins out from a death in Central Park into a transcendent aria of the metropolis.

A Field Guide to the North American Family, Hallberg’s first work of fiction, is now being reissued on the back of City on Fire’s success.

City on Fire is Dickensian in scope and Joycean in its verbal inventiveness — a lexical highwire act; A Field Guide focusing on two modern-day, middle-class families in the Long Island suburbs, is a svelte novella made up of 63 interlaced vignettes, which runs to just over 120 pages.

The fracturing of the Hungate and Harrison families — neighbours whose lives are thrown into turmoil by divorce and a death — is told through sketches that never run to more than a page. The entries are alphabetised under thematic headings, such as ‘Optimism’ and ‘Grief ’, each illustrated with pictures taken by a different photographer.

It’s a wholly distinct aesthetic from that of City on Fire, but a work equally steeped in a fascination with families of different stripes.

Hallberg’s writing style here is more lucid and malleable than the expansive immersion of City on Fire, evocative of masters of American suburbia such as Updike, Cheever, Salter and Richard Yates. The photographs come with meditative captions and playful cross-references to other entries.

The images themselves echo the work of photographers like William Eggleston or Alec Soth, in which mundane aspects of American life resonate with narrative power.

Conjuring a dreamily filmic spell, with shades of American Beauty and The Ice Storm, this is a work that can be approached (and rediscovered) a number of ways — all equally rewarding.