One of the characters keeps a copy of Henry James’s Prefaces in his desk. (It was not a thing to say “That’s a thing, right?” in 1977 the word heteronormative did not enter the language until 1991.) But in the moments when Hallberg flexes his literary muscles, the effect is more charming than grating. The characters sound a lot like the narrator, and sometimes what they say is anachronistic. Hallberg is better at aristocrats than anarchists, better at drugs than sex, better at free indirect style than at mimicking the distinct idioms of the American vernacular. Evocations of 9/11 sound hollow and sententious, as they almost always do in fiction. As we follow the thread of the shooting backward and forward in time, we witness the courtship and dissolution of several couples and the aspirations and epiphanies of a rainbow of neurotic, cynical, idealistic, insecure strivers. This crime connects downtown anarchist punks with uptown plutocrats, and disaffected suburbanites with loft-dwelling artists.

On New Year’s Eve, a girl from Long Island is shot in Central Park. At the center of the story is a whodunit that is also, in the best detective-novel tradition, something of a red herring. A wrist-straining 944 pages long, City on Fire contains at least a dozen major characters, a score of colorful bit players, and a bouquet of typographical extras.

Hallberg, a 36-year-old southerner, turns his lack of firsthand knowledge into an advantage, conjuring a pulsing metropolis out of legend, lyrical prose, studious imitation, and the thrilling arrogance of imagination. Meanwhile, the diffident navel-gazing of so much 21st-century fiction summons forth spasms of longing for the sprawling, ambitious doorstops of yesteryear.Ĭity on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg’s first novel, set mainly in Manhattan in the months leading up to the blackout that started on July 13, 1977, seems designed to satisfy both kinds of nostalgia. The spectacle of present-day Gotham, swimming in hedge-fund money and farm-to-table cuisine, induces regular pangs of wistful retrospect, either for a golden age of glamour or a later, grittier, meaner moment whose dangers have taken on a patina of vanished authenticity. What New York City has in common with the American novel is that it is, almost by definition and for as long as anyone can remember, Not What It Used to Be.

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