Research Notes: City on Fire

This is not the book cover. It is just a city that happens to be on fire.

Here's a weird thing that happens. You sell a book, and awesome, you are an author now. And probably you'll be able to sell another book, unless this first one tanks (which it could. It totally could. I can imagine seventeen different ways in which it could tank).

But also now you are out in the marketplace. You meet with things like "We're going to pass on your book that includes a nine-year old boy on a road trip with his mom, because we've already got a book about a seven-year old girl on a road trip with her grandpa coming out next year" (this is actually why an editor passed on my book, for real). So when something comes out that is a huge book, both in sheer physical bulk and in the amount of attention/money it garners, and is in the realm of a project you are working on, you sort of have to pay attention.

I think this is what people feel like when they say "They stole my idea! I was totally going to write a television pilot about puppets who run a late night talk show!"

Anyway, I'm still in early days on this project and I start hearing about this big NYC 1977 book. Dude got $2m for it (I know this is just a "rumored" number, but yes, he got at least that much), sold the development rights before he sold the book. A dear friend has taken to calling it Great American Novel as she spitefully hauls it around the city. So I dutifully bought a copy the day it came out and launched in.

We should start by saying I was primed to dislike it. I even mentioned in an email to my agent, "I'm about to hate-read this book." And I did, I seriously hated it. I made it through about 400 pages and then I stopped, because hate.

Let's talk about what Hallberg does well. He's excellent at writing about wealth and its trappings. When the book moves through the luxe apartments and houses of the New York uber-rich, the author's prose style really finds its match. This is perhaps less true when he turns to the corridors of power: the office buildings where the money is being made seem vague. I pictured the board room of Queen Consolidated/Palmer Industries from Arrow. Probably because I kept thinking I could be better spending my time catching up on Arrow. In fact, I'd say work gets the short end here. Most of the characters don't seem to have jobs, or at least not jobs that take up much of their time.

Wait, I'm supposed to be saying good things.

There is an abundance of period detail. Strike that, there is an overabundance (fuck, I'm doing it again). At least once a page there is a THING FROM THE SEVENTIES. I understand the intent was authenticity, but it ends up feeling like an overly-intricate lie, and rather than noting the finely-wrought detail work, I found myself fact-checking. This is totally spiteful, and for the most part pointless. I mean, it's a big release from a major publishing house. Shit's been fact-checked. But I would like to note that it's almost impossible that Sam would be able to dub a record onto eight-track for Charlie, because that wasn't really a consumer-grade technology at the time, outside of serious audio-heads. Suck it, dude.

All right, time to let rip. I thought the prose was terrible. Clumsy, overwrought, thick with modifiers. Also, his tenses are a mess. He repeatedly makes this move from fuzzy time to the definite which drives me nuts. Something something something. And now, sitting on steps and drinking the eponymous beverage he purchased at an Orange Julius, he thought... There's nothing wrong with it, it just bugs me, especially because the movement of time in the novel is pretty fuzzy in general. Even in the (much lauded) opening chapters, there's this kind of slack formulation of time when it feels like we should be spiraling tightly around the inciting incident.

Speaking of which, I don't like offing a young girl so that you can have a plot. It was cheap and unearned. Maybe he manages to earn it post hoc by making the character more three dimensional, but I'm doubtful. She's an object of desire, a punk Manic Pixie Dreamgirl, and then she's dead (or in a coma, I guess). Her shooting serves as Charlie's ticket into the world of the novel (which is to say, into New York) and connects several of the characters by Dickensian coincidence, but she's not really there. To borrow a comic book term, she gets fridged.

The female who remains conscious doesn't fare much better. She's introduced to us drunk and high (which is to say, fuzzy, ineffectual) and, in the chapter where I finally decided to bail, is going all twitterpated at the nearness of a younger guy with exceptional hair who's new to the office. If it's a general rule that you can endear a character to an audience by having them demonstrate mastery, the reverse is just as true: if you want to inspire audience contempt in a character, show them being needlessly inept, particularly at work.

There's a certain queasiness about homosexual sex throughout. Hetero sex is an act of pleasure, but gay sex is presented as A) risk-taking, B) bargaining, or C) an act of athleticism/violence. Of course, by the time the author gets around to describing hetero sex acts (I'm going to paraphrase here, but roughly: "as part of him entered part of her, another part of him wondered..."), readers might be relieved the author skirts homosexual intercourse with euphemisms like "in flagrante" and "athletic fucking."

But I've skirted around perhaps the most relevant fact, for my purposes. This book is terrible at writing about punk. It's annoying enough that he's imagined a world where the Ramones and Patti Smith exist but not Television (because Ex Post Facto/Ex Nihilo stands in for the band). But the author doesn't seem to really enjoy the music. In the early chapters, Charlie pores over an Ex Post Facto record, making sure he hasn't missed a chord, and when the author pays any attention to music, it's with that same clinical detachment. Charlie, who is notably Jewish but really into Jesus, is also our entry into the punk world while really being more of a Bowie fan. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if you want to talk about glam, go ahead and talk about glam. New York 77 would provide ample opportunities to talk about glam as a music and as an aesthetic. The author seems like he's been shackled with punk as his soundtrack.

Probably the worst of this is when Nicky Chaos is explaining his philosophy to Charlie (this is, I think, the chapter before I bailed). It comes off as a sloppy mix of Situationism and nihilism, without giving proper respect to either. In addition to being utterly charmless, Nicky Chaos is being set up as a false prophet (I can only assume Will would have ended up the True Prophet, had I kept reading), but as the only one who speaks on behalf of punk, his freshman year philosophy schtick hobbles it as a cultural movement/artifact. The fact Charlie is taken in by it makes him another contemptibly inept player in the piece. The author doesn't trust punk to bear any narrative weight; it's a convenient subculture, a place to run away to, a youth culture ready to be coopted, by the novel's sinister asexual land developer as much as by the author.

The good news? Even one moment of New York is still a big place, and I'm happy to work in the spaces the author largely ignores. It's what I was going to do anyway.