On Books: City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg
June 30, 2017
For me, Summer 2017 was shimmering magic, a time that remains incomparable to any other period in my life otherwise defined by “important moments,” like a vacation or major event. Reminiscing over those few months from four years ago incites a visceral reaction in me to date - the playlist in my mind immediately switches to guitars and drums, set to the backdrop of hot evenings in Soho and the Lower East Side, fond memories of walking endlessly around NYC, faces of people I’ve never met stamped into my mind because I’d unknowingly catalogued them for this very moment. I can still smell Gin by Commodity rising up from my collarbones into my neck, hair, and the air around me - it was a fan favorite, and my secret weapon. I wore black jeans and platform boots, catapulting style choices off of my obsession with The Crow, which had, in essence, been my personal starting point for that summer. I’d kept my hair shorter than I’d ever had it before, and I felt like a goddamn rockstar, a cool cat; I was bitchin’. And the fact is that nothing crazy happened that summer: no life-changing vacation, no new hobby, no cross-country move - everything was pretty stagnant, life-wise.
But stillness is what allows us to remember the smaller, defining joys/moments/things more clearly, with more feeling. So I think.
2017 was the year I spent reconnecting with art and music and all things heartwarming and lovely. I was finally done with law school, had taken and passed the bar exam, mentally decompressing, and ready to enjoy life without looming deadlines that would ~decide my future~. I particularly gravitated towards anything and everything related to New York City in the 1970s, rekindling my longtime fascination and obsession in full force. I let myself swim in books and movies about the iconic legacies of the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and David Bowie (typical), as well as devouring anything that waxed nostalgic on CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. I drowned my subway commute in the frantic anxiety of The Talking Heads and the bitterness of Richard Hell. As all my friends know, I re-watched Velvet Goldmine many, many times. It was absolutely sick, and also thrilling. I lived in nostalgia I’d never experienced, and most likely would not have survived had it been my own life: for all the grunge, glamor, decadence, and ecstasy that comes to mind when thinking of NYC in the 70s, it wasn’t a time or place for the faint-hearted. NYC was nearly bankrupt and crime was a regular occurrence on the doorsteps of homes that are now in some of the city’s safest neighborhoods (side note: read this - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/t-magazine/1970s-new-york-history.html). The excitement and rush of night-to-day-to-night partying, nonconformity in all areas of life, unapologetic celebration of youth and rebellion, and some of the best music this world has produced, were all dancing on constant, pulsating danger and darkness. I reveled in it every day.
I also read City on Fire during the Summer of 2017, and it changed my life. Though I read other books that summer, this is the one that I hang on to, the one that my memory commingles with the non-events of my own life, to a point where I feel as if I lived the lives imagined in that book. I’ve recommended it to all my friends, but I don’t think I know anyone who has actually finished it - it is 944 pages long, and it’s not a work you read passively. You want to live it, breathe it, and commit to it.
City on Fire follows a multitude of characters from different walks of life, all of whom connect in some way at some point of the novel. While the book starts off with an intent to solve the mysterious shooting of a teenage girl in Central Park, it becomes so much larger than that. Perhaps that is where most readers get frustrated, because the novel is really not a mystery at all, but rather, an unfurling of lives. You have Samantha, an NYU student, the teenage girl from the suburbs getting her “in” to NYC’s punk downtown, and Charlie, a lost Long Island boy eager to please Samantha and find his own place in the city. On the opposite end are Regan Hamilton-Sweeney, former Vassar girl and PR handler for her family’s firm, and her finance bro husband Keith. At the center of it all is the romance between Regan’s estranged brother, William Hamilton-Sweeney, a boarding-school-dropout-turned-punk-band-frontman, heir to a large fortune he wants nothing to do with, and Mercer Goodman, a young Black writer who is running from the confines of suburban Georgia and a conservative family to teach English at a Manhattan prep-school. Mercer ultimately aspires to write The Great American Novel, and William is a wandering artist, through and through. Their story is beautiful, it makes you feel deeply. It is also painful in the way that good stories are. Hallberg’s primary feat in this book is telling William and Mercer’s tale with genuine care and intention. Their plot doesn’t serve as a means to fill a diversity quota, and is not an afterthought - it’s organic and raw, the electrical current that powers City on Fire from its supercharged beginning through the chaos of its main event, the blackout of 1977. You should read it.
11/21/2017, post-summer
I’m revisiting City on Fire today because I’ve been thinking a lot about the last 12ish years I’ve spent/lived in this city, and what post-pandemic life may really look like - maybe not as I’ve known it, but perhaps closer to a recent past. History repeats itself.
The energy of New York City is incomparable to that in most other cities - it’s simultaneously stimulating and draining, and it’s exactly that tension that has birthed some of the world’s most passionate artists, brilliant minds, and cultural pioneers. It’s the ebb and flow of life on this island that comforts me into knowing that even in its downs, NYC will never be boring, and there will always be purpose here.
A lot of people I know read books and watch movies and shows for the thrill of the ending. Humans feel particularly warmed by the validation that comes with accurately predicting the ending to a story, especially when such story is recognized by tastemakers as particularly good. On the other hand, we love being surprised - mind-blown, unsettled, sometimes wow-ed, and other times, disgusted, by an unpredictable ending. The shock value never ceases to amaze us.
But that is exactly where I tend to get into heated debates with friends and family - like anyone else, I can appreciate a good ending, an unpredictable twist in plot. However, I tend to read and watch largely for the journey, and the feeling a book or movie or show may elicit in any given sentence or scene. This results in my having to (more often than not) justify why I find a work to be good art, or at least art worthy of attention and consumption. A completely predictable ending never puts me off, and I get satisfaction largely from smaller descriptive details, side plots, and wordplay. I fall in love with well-written characters in a heartbeat, regardless of where they end up by the conclusion of the story, and cherish the visuals painted by the author.
I’m not mentioning the above to prepare you for a disappointing ending to a City on Fire, however. Despite my methods of deriving value from reading and watching, I still do have a sense of what makes an objectively good ending. City on Fire concludes triumphantly, and beautifully, but it does take a while to get there. When you do, it’s worth it.
See what I did here?