City on Fire

I feel bad giving this only 3 stars because Hallberg is a hell of a writer (I very rarely feel envious of other people's talents but man, he makes it look so effortless and new). The first 500-600 pages alone were worth all the hype. Unfortunately, it kinda falls apart after that.

I get it, it's hard to maintain perfect control over a 900+ page monster that includes a panoramic cast of characters, multiple timelines and painstakingly researched historical background. But Hallberg's characters at some point lose all definition. They also become boring :/ The plot drags on and on and on in the end (which in this case is roughly 300 pages long) and the only big reveal – whose voice it was that opened the story – is just not worth the carpal tunnel. The old adage that every sentence in a story should move the plot forward applies to at least 30% of this.

Disappointed, but will give Hallberg all the chances anyway because he's a super talented dude.

3.5 Well ... I finished/sadzMy expectations, particularly after the first two or three hundred pages, and the ultimate whole of the novel did not meet in a happy place. The bulk or rather the focal part of the story goes from November 1976 to July 14th 1977 and each chapter alternates between the POV of about eight characters presenting a quasi panoramic view NYC and it's denizens. It was a particularly epic time: the bicentennial had just passed, the city was bankrupt, Gerald Ford had told us to “drop dead”, the punks were here and their aesthetic was a thing, the Bronx was literally burning, SoHo was the place for scrappy art galleries, and LES/LowerEastSide/Loisada was awash in drugs. What I'm saying is that this era is fertile ground for riveting stories and at first I felt the author was going to deliver, a la [b:The Bonfire of the Vanities 2666 The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1542903489l/2666.SY75.jpg 1080201], however that wasn't the case.The problem IMO is that inordinate amount of narrative space is given over to characters that are interesting to no one. Not even themselves. We spend hundreds of pages in the head of a seventeen year old Long Island teen, who's reasonably appealing, as much as a teen can be, but then he falls under the spell of a navel gazing proto-anarchist with quarter backed political ideas (the result of narcissism on drugs) and his acolytes. We spend ice ages in their boring, yawn inducing company. My eyes glazed over more than once. Meanwhile Mercer Goodman and William Hamilton-Sweeney, the characters that hooked me, the evidently interesting ones through which it would be feasible to explore this New World from two vastly different perspectives, are almost shuffled off stage. Inexplicable. I hope that if this ever gets adapted as a tv miniseries, and I thing it should, the writers can fix that. I hope.On the plus side (and what makes the disappointment sadder) the city is rendered with the eye of a native, the writing was excellent, almost cinematic, and I learned quite a few words. My favorite? intercrural sex