I wrote a scene in a white heat, and it scared me so much. By the time I got to the bottom of the page, the size of it, the impossibility of it, the idea that something this large defied my abilities as a writer. — Garth Risk Hallberg on his 900-page, $2-
Garth Risk Hallberg’s ambitious account of the 1977 New York blackout is a love letter to a city that never quite existed
‘The city I’d dreamed about and put so much of my hopes in — to see it bleeding’
In 1975, America’s then-president Gerald Ford was asked to give New York City a federal bailout to ease its many troubles. The Big Apple was in a bad way throughout the ’70s, reeling from a recession and without the resources to manage its five boroughs and growing population. President Ford declined, and the New York Daily News ran a now famous headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The following year, a young man from Long Island named Billy Joel would release Turnstiles, an album with a track about the world turning its back on New York. “I saw the lights go out on Broadway,” he crooned, “I saw the ruins at my feet.” The song, “Miami 2017,” was written from the perspective of a retired New Yorker explaining to a child how the apocalypse had hit the city. A year later, in July of 1977, the lights really did go out all over town, after lightning struck two already overloaded power grids. People rioted through the night. More than 3,500 people were arrested in the space of 12 hours, and some 1,000 fires were reported.
Flash forward a quarter century, and the song, inspired by a headline, opens up a tap in the mind of a young novelist, Garth Risk Hallberg, an idea for a big story coming at him in a flash. Having finally decided to move to New York, Hallberg was on a bus heading into the city, hoping to find an apartment where he and his wife could live. “I got to the place in New Jersey where you first see the skyline, where I always felt this feeling of, ‘Oh, I’m home, I’m there, where I belong,’ ” Hallberg says over the phone from his place in Brooklyn. “Miami 2017” was on his iPod, and as he looked at the skyline he thought about all that had burned in the historic ’ 77 blackout, the widespread arson and looting as New York’s citizens poured into the steamy night. Staring out the window, he tells me, “I just thought, ‘Oh, all of these things, these mysteries that I’m obsessing about and dreaming about — that’s where they find their expression: it’s that time, this place. And this is a book, and this is the book I should write.’ ” He takes a breath. “There’s this torrential thing — a big bang or something in my head, and I got off the bus at the Port Authority and started writing. I wrote a scene in a white heat, and it scared me so much. By the time I got to the bottom of the page, the size of it, the impossibility of it, the idea that something this large defied my abilities as a writer.” He put the results of that first jolt in a drawer, looking back from time to time, waiting to grow into the writer he felt he needed to become to get this story down. City on Fire, the novel that began on that bus ride, comes out next week.
The book is a nostalgic love letter to a city that may not quite have ever existed, taking place, for the most part, in the six months leading up to the ’77 blackout, tracing the ways a dozen disparate people shape, sometimes unknowingly, each others’ lives. The plot spools out over 944 pages, the initial pull arriving in the form of a teenage girl getting shot in Central Park on New Year’s Eve. Sam, the girl, had found a new crowd in the East Village, having moved from the spacious suburbs of Long Island into cramped quarters with anarchist punks whose affinity for Antonio Gramsci was matched only by their affection for coke and weed. The squalor is a kind of glamour, borrowing from the false memories of people who weren’t there of Patti Smith readings and Ramones shows. Sam, an art-school freshman, takes a lover, Keith, who is married to Regan, the sister of William, a rich-kid artist type who rejects the path set for him by his extremely wealthy family, whose famous last name appears on several of this imagined city’s buildings and squares.
Short chapters flit over many characters. We learn about William’s lover, Mercer, and his longing for New York, and then suddenly we’re in the basement bedroom of Charlie, a Long Island teenager engaged in the tough business of determining for himself how to be whoever he actually is. Sections are broken apart by what the text calls “interludes,” styled documents that take the form of a typed draft of a magazine profile, or an issue of a personal zine, or a handwritten letter from a father to his son. The unruly cast and imagined archival documents mimic the desperate density of the city, teeming with people, all their dreams and desires barely cushioned from the grind.
Growing up in eastern North Caro- lina, Hallberg lived hours away from any city, let alone New York. By the time he was 17, he tells me, he’d fallen in with a group of kids living in Washington, D.C. — a five-hour drive away. “They were so excitingly cosmopolitan and creative and interesting,” he says. “And I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.” From there, he’d often steal away to New York, another five hours on a bus. “That’s where I always wanted to go and be a writer,” he says.
Since January this year, I’ve seen five friends move to New York to be writers, or to be better writers, or to be writers for bigger places, or maybe just to be writers in New York. The city, immortalized in so many songs and novels and paintings and movies, has a magnetic draw for so many, and Hallberg captures the allure he himself felt, all the yearning and wanting and longing, in Mercer Goodman, the school teacher and aspiring novelist from Georgia whose needful sweetness holds so much of City on Fire together. Hallberg admits he gave his own early hunger to Mercer, who walks the streets while internally rehearsing his inevitable Paris Review interview and trying on all the trappings of literary success, if only in his mind.
City on Fire sets New York up as a kind of fairy tale (there’s even an evil stepmother quietly strolling through the plot, alongside her brother, the sinister Austrian architect of so much personal ruin). It’s a fairy tale Hallberg grew up believing, and in talking with him, I get the sense he still sort of does. New York is as much mythology as it is real, Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind” nestled up against Frank Sinatra’s “Kinda Town,” a place where Paul Auster can write postmodern ghost stories and Edith Wharton can skewer a Gilded Age, where Peter Parker can don a lycra suit and snap up criminals in his spider’s web. In the end, City on Fire is all myth, even as it’s set against a verifiable backdrop.
After college, Hallberg found himself living in D.C. with his wife, both of them eager to make their way to the city. “I was working my first adult job, a quasi journalistic job, writing content for a website,” Hallberg says. “In the offices, we had banks of TVs, papers, a constant media stream, which was unusual for 2001.” When Sept. 11 happened, Hallberg was watching it from a distance, not knowing that the intensity of grief he felt would harden years later into City on Fire. “We heard about the first plane very early, and went down to the conference room and essentially watched thousands of people die, live, while being told by voiceover that the Pentagon had been hit, which was a half mile from where we were. It was a formative experience.” He pauses. “I’m not trying to own this — this is something that hundreds of thousands of people experienced together, none more than people who were in New York at that time. But, for me, the city I had dreamed about and put so much of my hopes in and idealized — to see it bleeding like that. And to know that it might not be there the next day, this thing that I counted on as the future, and in a lot of ways representing what the future might hold for humanity, as far as different kinds of people being able to live alongside each other in relative peace and to make things — the vision of losing that. And of everyone losing that.”
City on Fire is a novel about loss and hope and a city overlaid with dreams; it’s a fiction built out of other fictions. I ask Hallberg if setting the novel in the past was a way to eclipse the inconvenience of writing about the present, the inelegance of our undigested cultural experiences always being mediated and regurgitated by the Internet. He asks me to imagine his parents, growing up in the ’ 60s, and the sense of power they felt as a generation to change the world. Then he describes his teenage years, during the Clinton administration, where he and his friends would “look at the world and be like, we can make stuff and change stuff, locally on the small scale but the big humming machine is just gonna do it’s thing.” One powerful thing, he says, about moments like Sept. 11, and the 1977 blackout, “was that there was this pause after, for months, where people were like, ‘ Wow, we have some decisions to make, personally and collectively, about what our lives mean, and what we’re gonna do, and how we’re gonna respond to this.’ ” Another pause. “The mask,” he explains, “slipped a little bit.”
Moments where the masks slip are the hardest to grapple with in real time, he suggests. “I have this theory that a lot of interesting writing about right now is being done masked — expressed via stories set 10 to 30, 30 years in the past, like The Flamethrowers, or Tree of Smoke, the great Iraq War novel that just happens to be set in Vietnam.” Perhaps, then, like City on Fire, a 9/11 novel set in 1977.