Review of “City on Fire,” by Garth Risk Hallberg
But the “lens” on the encounter in a crosswalk between a Christmas tree and an empty shopping cart (a tidy image of economic dissonance) is Mercer. Everything in the scene is as he sees it and thinks it. “Bedlamite,” an obsolete Britishism, is there because it’s a word that a literary guy like Mercer would know. Even the description of Mercer is Mercer’s description. Every chapter is in this mode. We get the picture from one point of view at a time. There are few wide-angle shots. The story is assembled in slices.
Hallberg has an M.F.A. from N.Y.U. and lives in New York, but he was born in Louisiana, grew up in North Carolina, went to college in Missouri, and was not alive in the nineteen-seventies. To a person who did live in New York in the nineteen-seventies—to wit, this person—his powers of evocation are uncanny. Hell’s Kitchen, the Bowery, Central Park West, the subway, the L.I.R.R.—it’s as though he’d once walked those streets, ridden those cars.
He acknowledges the help of several books on New York, including Ken Auletta’s classic “The Streets Were Paved with Gold,” published in 1979, and Jonathan Mahler’s more recent “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.” Slips are minimal. (The tag of the pioneer graffiti artist Taki was Taki 183, not Taki 8, for instance.) But “City on Fire” is not overstuffed with period detail. It’s not that kind of historical novel.
There is virtually no mention of the Yankees, for instance, although they won the World Series in 1977, under the guidance of the thin-skinned sourball Billy Martin, or the campaign for mayor, at the end of which, to the dismay of liberals, Ed Koch defeated Mario Cuomo. Son of Sam, then known as “the .44-calibre killer,” is not in the book, although he killed five people between January and July, 1977, and was finally captured that August.
It’s not the facts that bring the nineteen-seventies to life in “City on Fire.” What Hallberg is after is an atmosphere, and he gets it. He gets the assaultive feeling the city had in those bombed-out years. He gets the ubiquitous defacement of public surfaces, the shuttered shops and derelict street people, the soul-destroying round-the-clock noise. His New York is a city that never sleeps not because there’s always more fun to be had but because it has insomnia.
But he is (like Dickens) a romantic about human nature. “City on Fire” will probably be compared with Tom Wolfe’s big, class-intersecting novel about New York in the nineteen-eighties, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You read it here first that this would be a mistake. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” as the allusion to Thackeray tells us, is a satire. “City on Fire” is not remotely satirical. The good guys are truly good, or, at least, they have honorable intentions and suffer remorse when they fall short. The few characters who are without a conscience had tough childhoods. The system is not to blame, it seems, nor is human folly. It’s just that some people manage to transcend their family mess (every family in the novel is some sort of mess), and some can’t, in which case they might deal with their pain by doing bad things, like burning down the South Bronx.
Hallberg is also a romantic about the nineteen-seventies. That may seem a strange species of nostalgia. The decade between 1972 and 1982 was the worst extended economic period since the nineteen-thirties. There were two oil crises, the first in 1973, when the price of a barrel nearly quadrupled, and the second in 1978-79, when it tripled. The stock market crashed in grim slow motion. Between 1972 and 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost half its value, and the market did not get back to 1972 levels until 1982. In 1975, unemployment jumped to 8.5 per cent. The inflation rate exceeded ten per cent. By late 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected President, the prime rate was twenty per cent.
In New York, it was the same only worse. From 1970 to 1976, the city lost more than six hundred thousand jobs. By 1976, unemployment stood at eleven per cent, and one in every seven New Yorkers was on welfare. The city was broke and had to be bailed out. “Ford to City: Drop Dead” was the famous Daily News headline, but Ford did not in fact say those words, and Congress eventually provided the financial assistance the city needed to climb back out of the red.
The price for that aid was austerity measures, and the reduction in city services, as well as poor decisions about things like the allocation of firehouses, led to areas of the city, like the Lower East Side and the South Bronx, becoming wastelands of drugs, abandoned buildings, muggings, robberies, and arson. Signs of blight were everywhere, a kind of urban eczema.
New York felt empty—there were so many parts of it where people didn’t want to go—and out of control. It was the time of broken windows. But, in part because of the collapse, the city also felt open, liberated, available. Anything seemed possible, especially to people who didn’t have much to begin with—avant-garde artists and performers, New Wave musicians, experimental writers, advanced students of the society of the spectacle. It wasn’t quite Saint-Germain-des-Prés after 1945 or Berlin after 1989, but Manhattan in the nineteen-seventies had a kind of locally grown cultural magnetism.
The piece of the downtown subculture that Hallberg takes on is the music scene. It was centered on two clubs, C.B.G.B., at Bowery and Bleecker, and the renovated Max’s Kansas City, on Park Avenue South. Those clubs were where groups like the Ramones, Television, and Blondie—groups at first known only by word of mouth—performed. It cost a dollar to see the Ramones at C.B.G.B. (You had to pay for drinks.)
The main downtown characters in “City on Fire” are the members of a punk band called Ex Nihilo and assorted hangers-on. The most successful of these is Charlie, a geeky Long Island teen-ager who is making the difficult taste transition from David Bowie to Patti Smith. To the extent that “City on Fire” is a novel of education, like the nineteenth-century novels that Mercer is obsessed with, Charlie is the hero. As a detective story, though, the book has two main actors: the leader of Ex Nihilo, who uses the stage name Nicky Chaos, and his uptown counterpart, Amory Gould, a businessman who has a scheme to make money from urban blight and might require a little surreptitious help with the blight part.
Nicky is a practitioner of the Situationist art of negation. He is a firebug who collects Herb Alpert records and talks about Marx and Nietzsche. He describes himself as a “post-Humanist,” and says things like “Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom—not when someone is framing the choices for you,” and, “This is the ’70s now, the death trip, the destruction trip, the internal contradictions rumbling and grumbling, the return of the repressed. It’s the system, having swallowed everything, having indigestion.”
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