City on Fire

June 1, 2015
Hallberg’s maniacally detailed, exhaustingly clever depiction of 1970s New York is packed with urban angst, intellectual energy, and sinister pitfalls, much like the city it evokes. This epic of drugs, sex, and rock and roll combines fiction and new journalistic accounts of real events, with a character’s typed manuscript drafts (spill marks included), hand-written diaries, notebooks, photographs, cartoons, drawings, homework, and personal correspondence. A cast of characters drawn from all social strata features William Hamilton-Sweeney, artist and sometime heroin addict, once heir to a fortune, once lead guitarist for the post-humanist rock band Ex Post Facto; and Sam Cicciaro, the girl everyone finds irresistible, discovered half-dead in Central Park by William’s lover, Mercer. The search to identify Sam’s attacker is one of several story lines tying the ambitious work together; another is Mercer’s attempt, propelled by William’s sister, Regan, to bring William back into the family fold as their father’s business collapses and troubles in the family mount. Charlie, an alienated teenager who becomes a rock band groupie, falls for Sam. Meanwhile Richard Kosgroth, veteran journalist and Capote wannabe, interviews Sam’s father, New York’s fireworks king. Seventies survivors will not be surprised when city residents come together during the ’77 blackout. Readers wishing to wallow in cultural trivia will find much to savor in Hallberg’s all-encompassing, occasionally overwritten effort, but others will be left to wonder how so much energy could generate so little light. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company.

Starred review from July 15, 2015
Rough-edged mid-1970s New York provides the backdrop for an epic panorama of musicians, writers, and power brokers and the surprising ways they connect. New Year's Eve 1976: Sam, a fanzine author and hanger-on in the Manhattan punk scene, abandons her plan to attend a concert and instead heads to Central Park, where she's later discovered shot and clinging to life. Why'd she head uptown? Who shot her? Thereby hangs a remarkably assured, multivalent tale that strives to explore multiple strata of Manhattan life with photographic realism. Most prominent in this busy milieu are William, the scion of a banking family who's abandoned money for the sake of music, art, and drugs; Nicky, the coke-fueled head of an East Village squat who delivers motor-mouthed pronunciamentos on post-humanism and is curiously in the know about arson in the Bronx; Richard, a magazine journalist whose profile of Sam's father, the head of a fireworks firm, leads to suspicion that there's a bigger story to be told. With more than 900 pages at his disposal, Hallberg (A Field Guide to the North American Family, 2007) gives his characters plenty of breathing room, but the story never feels overwritten, and the plotlines interlace without feeling pat. One theme of the novel is the power that stories, true or false, have over our lives, so it's hard to miss other writers' influences here. At times the novel feels like a metafictional tribute to America's finest doorstop manufacturers, circa 1970 to the present: Price (street-wise cops), Wolfe (top-tier wealth), Franzen (busted families), Wallace (the seductions of drugs and pop culture), and DeLillo (the unseen forces behind everything). That's not to say he's written a pastiche, but as his various plotlines braid tighter during the July 1977 blackout, his novel becomes an ambitious showpiece for just how much the novel can contain without busting apart. The very-damn-good American novel.

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Starred review from August 1, 2015
This magnificent first novel is full to bursting with plot, character, and emotion, all set within an exquisitely grungy 1970s New York City. Erstwhile fanzine writer Sam Cicciaro heads to Central Park on New Year's Eve and is found hours later barely clinging to life after being shot in the head. Why this charismatic punk-rock fan was shot is just one of the many plot strands in this sprawling but completely engrossing novel that incorporates many kinds of stories, from the pages of Sam's fanzine to a typed manuscript, complete with water stains and deletion marks. In addition, the cast is drawn from all walks of life, from William Hamilton-Sweeney, musician and heroin addict and the estranged son of a banking titan; to his black lover, Mercer, a prep-school teacher transplanted from small-town Georgia; to Richard Kosgroth, an obsessive magazine reporter who senses sinister forces at work. Graceful in execution, hugely entertaining, and most concerned with the longing for connection, a theme that reaches full realization during the blackout of 1977, this epic tale is both a compelling mystery and a literary tour de force.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Prepub buzz is off the charts for this massive debut novel, which will benefit still further from an all-stops-out marketing campaign.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2015

This epic, well-written, and highly entertaining first novel is set in New York City from around Christmas 1976 to the blackout of July 1977. Years earlier, wealthy widower William Hamilton-Sweeney had become engaged to a woman whose wheeler-dealer brother takes over the family's business empire and pushes aside William's children, Regan and William III. By late 1976, Regan is separated from her husband, while her brother has emerged from the Sixties with a heroin habit and is alienated from the entire family. He's also pursuing a relationship with Mercer Goodman, an intelligent young black man from Georgia. Meanwhile, remnants of the band William once belonged to have holed up on Manhattan's Lower East Side and are plotting some kind of a revolution, possibly violent. Lost souls attracted to the band include Charlie Weisbarger and Samantha Cicciaro, both of whom are central to several of the plot threads interwoven within these many pages. It all comes together or unravels on the wild, riotous night of the blackout, probably one of the low points in recent New York City history and vividly depicted in a suitable denouement for this anticipated blockbuster of a novel. VERDICT Throughout, Hallberg expertly handles the multiple shifts in perspective, vibrantly portraying a specific time and place and creating memorable characters--especially Charlie and Regan, a complicated mess of a poor little rich girl who manages to be heroic in her own way--all wandering the vast, ongoing American dreamscape that is New York City. [See Prepub Alert, 4/13/15.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015

Last fall, the publisher bought this book for $2 million, big bucks indeed for a first novel even if Scott Rudin had already optioned the films rights. But respected book critic Hallberg writes likes a dream, and the plot should yank in anyone who loved Don DeLillo's Underworld, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, and other big-picture works. In 1970s New York, with the July 13, 1977, blackout fast approaching, a shooting in Central Park crisscrosses the lives of rich but disaffected Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney; Keith and Mercer, the men who love them; punk-obsessed suburban teens Charlie and Samantha; and more. With sale rights to 15 countries and a big national tour; one of the fall's biggest books.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015

This epic, well-written, and highly entertaining first novel is set in New York City from around Christmas 1976 to the blackout of July 1977. Years earlier, wealthy widower William Hamilton-Sweeney had become engaged to a woman whose wheeler-dealer brother takes over the family's business empire and pushes aside William's children, Regan and William III. By late 1976, Regan is separated from her husband, while her brother has emerged from the Sixties with a heroin habit and is alienated from the entire family. He's also pursuing a relationship with Mercer Goodman, an intelligent young black man from Georgia. Meanwhile, remnants of the band William once belonged to have holed up on Manhattan's Lower East Side and are plotting some kind of a revolution, possibly violent. Lost souls attracted to the band include Charlie Weisbarger and Samantha Cicciaro, both of whom are central to several of the plot threads interwoven within these many pages. It all comes together or unravels on the wild, riotous night of the blackout, probably one of the low points in recent New York City history and vividly depicted in a suitable denouement for this anticipated blockbuster of a novel. VERDICT Throughout, Hallberg expertly handles the multiple shifts in perspective, vibrantly portraying a specific time and place and creating memorable characters--especially Charlie and Regan, a complicated mess of a poor little rich girl who manages to be heroic in her own way--all wandering the vast, ongoing American dreamscape that is New York City. [See Prepub Alert, 4/13/15.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.