6/3/2023 0 Comments City on Fire by Antony Dapiran![]() At no time in the book did I believe I was hearing anything other than the novelist’s voice- and most of the time that novelist was hovering in my ears like a drunk mosquito. On almost every page he makes specific word choices and digressions of description that take the reader out of the story. His diction is out of control! (So much so that, yes, I find the exclamation point necessary.) It’s such a glaring problem, I’m rather shocked it wasn’t addressed further in editing. ![]() Hallberg cannot inhabit his characters individually. But the novel is structured primarily as a limited-omniscient, third-person account from the perspective of its individual characters. As a steak, the novel is riddled with gristle. On this account, City On Fire fails miserably. 900+ pages is a marvelous length, but no matter how artfully the words are assembled on them, they still need to convince the reader they are absolutely essential. Hallberg does not know how much is too much. The amount of detail conjured in these pages is frequently astonishing.Īnd yet: why? Why must the writer tell us, for example, the relative size of an heirloom mattress and what it took to move it into an apartment years before? Mr. ![]() There are passages in City On Fire that sublimely evoke New York City, portraying the Big Apple’s magnetism (and its monstrous shadow) so effectively as to make it feel like you’re walking the streets yourself. Garth Risk Hallberg is certainly a writer of exceptional promise and unmistakable ability. ![]()
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