Garth Risk Hallberg has written a great American novel on his first attempt. Set in 1970s Manhattan, an era memorialized with punk’s birth at the Bowery while the Bronx was in flames, City on Fire crosses the divides of class, age, sexuality and race with its characters. The story centers on the shooting of Samantha Cicciaro, a 17-year-old Bohemian artist from Long Island who has bought into the idea of reinvention in the big city. But the shooting is merely the novel’s lynch pin. Here is a book in which the plot is the rhythm section, not the melody, and it stays free of labored explanations and a forced climax. City on Fire is resolute and powerful, exceptional in that it retains life but is not so sacrosanct that is fails to create beauty in error.
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