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Garth Risk Hallberg

City on Fire

About the Book

A big-hearted, boundary-vaulting novel that heralds a remarkable new talent: set in 1970s New York, a story outsized in its generosity, warmth, and ambition, its deep feeling for its characters, its exuberant imagination.

The individuals who live within this extraordinary first novel are: Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city’s largest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown’s punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter; his idealistic neighbor; and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park. Their entangled relationships — which stretch from post-Vietnam youth culture to the fiscal crisis, from small-town Georgia to greater L. A.  — open up the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the infamous blackout of July 13th, 1977 plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever. A novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock ‘n’ roll, about how the people closest to us are sometimes the hardest to reach — about what it means to be human.

Published by Knopf, September 2015

City on Fire

Dedication TK

“There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself — there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold. ”

“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree. ”

— G. K. CHESTERTON, The Man Who Was Thursday

Prologue

IN NEW YORK, you can get anything delivered. Such, anyway, is the principle I’m operating on.

It’s the middle of summer, the middle of life. I’m in an otherwise deserted apartment on West Sixteenth Street, listening to the placid hum of the fridge in the next room, and though it contains only a mesozoic half-stick of butter my hosts left behind when they took off for the shore, in forty minutes I can be eating more or less whatever I can imagine wanting. When I was a young man — younger, I should say — you could even order in drugs. Business cards stamped with a 212 number and that lonesome word, delivery, or, more usually, some bullshit about therapeutic massage. I can’t believe I ever forgot this.

Then again, it’s a different city now, or people want different things. The bushes that screened hand-to-hand transactions in Union Square are gone, along with the payphones you’d use to dial your dealer. Yesterday afternoon, when I walked over there for a break, modern dancers were making a slo-mo commotion beneath the revitalized trees. Families sat orderly on blankets, in wine-colored light. I keep seeing this stuff everywhere, public art hard to distinguish from public life, polka-dot cars idling down on Canal, newsstands ribboned like gifts. As if dreams themselves could be laid out like options on the menu of available experience. Oddly, though, what this rationalizing of every last desire tends to do, the muchness of this current city’s muchness, is remind you that what you really hunger for is nothing you’re going to find out there.