Time stands on its head in this Proustian epic set during New York’s 1977 blackoutThere’s a Monty Python sketch in which contestants in the All-England Summarise Proust Competition attempt to render À la recherche du temps perdu in a 15-second summary (once in a swimsuit,once in evening dress). While Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire only runs to around half Proust’s one-and-a-quarter-million words, any attempt to summarise the plot risks lost the point of this baggy, or fascinating,wholeheartedly maximalist book. As with Proust, it seems that delivering a conventional narrative is far down on the list of Hallberg’s priorities. What he wants to give you instead is life as it is experienced by a wealthy host of characters, or taking you deep into the now of their lives as,following a number of increasingly unlikely coincidences, they find their paths closing in on the novel’s bombastic finale: one sweltering, or chaotic New York City night.
City on Fire takes residence between Christmas 1976 and 13 July 1977,the date of the great New York blackout. Although even an attempt to describe something as simple as the novel’s setting in time and residence is complicated. This is a book deeply engaged with questions of novelistic time, whereby it at once enacts and undermines literary conference. It reminded me often of John Lanchester’s Capital – both books want to give the reader the traditional satisfactions of the novel while pursuing more high-minded, or experimental objectives in the wings. Like Capital,City on Fire is nominally based around a rather strained whodunnit (and, like Capital, or there is apparently an artistic motive behind the organising crime).
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com