CITY ON FIRE

by Garth Risk Hallberg
 
First things first: this book is massive.  I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book this long and epic that wasn’t by Dickens or Dostoyevsky.  But Hallberg knows what he is doing, and I never once found myself counting pages.  He keeps the story moving, the mystery unraveling, and the cast of characters constantly changing. He even varies the format, inserting “interludes” with snippets of newspaper articles, journals and even a fan ‘zine.
 
City on Fire is set in New York City in the late ‘70s. This is the city my parents must have been envisioning when, driving through (in the ‘90s), they'd admonish us to keep the windows locked!  It is dirty, crime-ridden and full of artists and anarchists. A seemingly random shooting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve, 1976, connects an intricate web of personalities from New York’s richest mogul and his children, to a grieving teen from Long Island; from an Italian-American fireworks creator, to a Vietnamese-American girl from California who just wants to change the world.
 
The story is engrossing, and the writing clever and truthful.  For a first novel, this one’s a beast! (Lily)