Just Finished Reading Garth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire

I admit to never having heard of the writer Garth Risk Hallberg until I read a tweet of Stephen King a few weeks ago extolling his latest novel City on Fire, which King himself had just finished reading.  So, on his recommendation, I found myself a copy and have been struggling through this very lengthy and overly serious novel...which also happens to be Hallberg's very first...

When I say that City on Fire is overly serious, I mean by that that the author takes himself and his writing too seriously.  Also, the subject matter, which is how various New York City residents, divided or connected by class, family, race, sexual orientation, nationality, and culture, interact with each other amid the context of the 1976-77 Bicentenial/Blackout time, with the focus on that infamous blackout in July of '77 that was marked by such rioting and burning, leaves precious little room for any kind of levity...

Hallberg introduces in his ambitious work many "main" characters, and I often had trouble sorting through their relative significance in his story as it progressed.  I suppose the top protagonist, all things considered, is a disillusioned young artist named William Hamilton-Sweeney.  Much is made of his break with his wealthy family and their business empire, as well as his homosexuality and problematic heroin use.  And speaking of drugs, just about everyone in this book partakes of them liberally in one form or another: the implicit message here is that "normal" people snort cocaine, smoke pot, or shoot up heroin...a notion with which I completely disagree...

Aside from introducing a plethora of characters with whom I had difficulty relating, the author likes to jump around in time a lot, too: it might be in the early 2000's, or is it 1976 or 1961 or 1981 or 1977?  Each character seems to be in a perpetual state of brooding and self-examination, stuck in their pasts with all of their own personal traumas, grievances, and regrets:  a strategically-placed joke every now and then would have done wonders for this gloomy story...

Having unloaded my criticisms on this novel, however, I would like to compliment Hallberg on creating a sense as to what Manhattan was like back in the mid-to-late 1970s...an era very different from when I finally got around to visiting it in 2010, long after mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg cleaned it up.  But in 1977 there was more an atmosphere of violence, anarchy, and underground counterculture steeped in illicit drug use...especially in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side.  I have a feeling that City on Fire would carry a much deeper meaning for readers who had lived there back in that time...