City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Nullarbor in New York

If you're going to write a thousand page saga about 1970's New York City, you shouldn't make it as flat and featureless as Kansas in the wintertime. I hit the wall at page 200.

Hallberg is certainly a competent writer but narrative-competence alone doesn't create enough payoff for the reader who has to slog through the tome that is City on Fire. No engaging emotion, no memorable physical description (I have no idea what any of the protagonists might look like), no humour, no elegant prose, just interminable story with an increasing cast of unmemorable characters.

It's a bit risky, as well, to set a piece like this in a time and place within living memory but of which the author has no experience. Codgers like me get proprietorial about our youth and then are provoked to take aim at sexual and racial cliches that we feel are trite. Add to that the pointed use of period vocabulary like 'spaldeen' we get irrationally annoyed.

Nevertheless, I am sure there are many who will appreciate what Hallberg provides: if not chicken soup for the literary soul, then at least some sort of feast for the culturally starved. BON APPÉTIT.

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