City on Fire

Garth Risk Hallberg

Knopf, £18.99

In a just world, certain arguments would be irrelevant to any consideration of City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg's gloriously ambitious debut. $2 million dollar publishing contracts would go unmentioned. The fact that it is a big New York book would not invite lazy comparisons to every other big New York book. Eternally moronic debates over the appropriate length for a novel would be left to die. Ideally, City on Fire would be treated as a singular work of art, rather than shouldering the burden of spurious ephemera. Unfortunately, as the novel's distracting pre-publication buzz has demonstrated, we do not live in a just world.

Were it not such an emphatically personal work, City on Fire might have suffered from the preemptive (and inaccurate) comparisons freely employed by critics and publisher alike. Hallberg is not David Foster Wallace, nor (thankfully) is he Jonathan Franzen. However, he is now indisputably in their league. That is the only comparison with such authors required.

City on Fire finds several mirrors within itself. One amongst its army of characters labours over a painting intended to encompass the entirety of New York City, circa 1977. The novel's goal is little different, except it acknowledges the near-impossibility of the task. Hallberg posits that every kind of identity is, in part, a creative identity. Each inhabitant of New York carries a unique version of the city, reflected through the prism of themselves – "the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks". Hallberg's New York is not that of Tom Wolfe, Lou Reed or Jonathan Lethem. It is vividly and indisputably his own.

That said, as romantic and familiar as it may be, Hallberg's choice of canvas is not self-indulgent. 1970's New York, crippled by recession, unemployment and austerity, is a setting with far more relevancy than an outsider might suspect, and Hallberg exploits it to the full.

Much like Marisha Pessel's similarly immersive Night Film, City on Fire builds its intoxicating demi-monde around a central mystery: the shooting of 17-year-old punk Samantha on New Year's Eve, 1976. From there, via a Dickensian matrix of heroically implausible coincidences, the vast, lovingly wrought dramatis personae include Samantha's besotted best friend, the junkie rock singer both teenagers admire, the infamous plutocratic family to which the singer is scion, the singer's younger lover, a determined detective, an obsessed journalist, and dysfunctional extended families.

Thankfully, Hallberg is equally fascinated by his entire ensemble. Though their voices are rewardingly distinctive, Hallberg's characters share a similar drive: whether in art, music, love or life, they all nurture grand, quixotic quests that sustain and, perhaps, justify them. On this theme, Hallberg can be both mischievous and heartbreaking – because, one suspects, such maniacal drive is what led to City on Fire. Whether through offhand remarks or unashamed symbolism, there are so many barely veiled references to the literary mission Hallberg sets himself, one might think he was teasing the reader. Surely no writer shows their cards this easily?

Yet Hallberg sees no reason to conceal the thinking behind his art. The author, it seems, is not dead yet. There's something supremely refreshing about that. Perhaps the most difficult aesthetic challenge facing the novel is its recreation of punk, a period and philosophy that often sit uneasily within the confines of mannered prose. Nevertheless, improbably, this studious and erudite novel sincerely embodies a punk sensibility. When the Hydra of its narrative reaches a phantasmagorical peak in 1977's city-wide blackout, when fires and looting almost tore New York apart, Hallberg's belief that moments of destruction and chaos can be transformational shines through, with moving results.

Some critics already resent City on Fire for doing too many things. One suspects what they truly resent is that it does too many things well. Hallberg occupies a middle-ground between the social epics of the 19th century and the all-encompassing endeavour of modernism, and achieves much inside that comfortably gigantic expanse.

Though the novel confronts identity, idealism, love, youth, art, ambition, the political and the personal, the persistent charm of City on Fire is how it luxuriates in an impressionistic recreation of place, mood and atmosphere. If there are lengthy, luminous descriptive sections of Hallberg's prose that exist for no other reason than to be beautiful, there is nothing wrong with that. Quite the opposite: the beauty of such passages permeates the entire book, and could easily support another hundred pages. That's right. City on Fire – all 900-plus pages of it -– is, if anything, too short.

Sean Bell