"How was it possible for a book to be as big as life?" Mercer Goodman wonders towards the end of Garth Risk Hallberg's huge novel, City On Fire. On the way to save his lover from being blown up by a revolutionary cell of punks, he is caught in the New York blackout of July 1977. He has also spent the last 900 pages not working on the "Great American novel" he had intended to write. One can't imagine Hallberg having the same worry about scale: if there is a charge that can be levelled against his exciting, imaginative and perfectly paced debut, it's that it might be too big for life.
City On Fire, as well as being an examination of the New York punk scene in the 70s, is a coming-of-age tale, a family drama and a detective story. With its main action unspooling between 1976 and 77, the book shuttles back and forth through time, filling in the narrative from 1960 to the early years of the millennium.
Along with Mercer Goodman, we spend most of our time with the super-rich Hamilton-Sweeney clan, beginning with its absconding heir and Goodman's troubled boyfriend, William Hamilton-Sweeney III (the numeral forms the basis of his punk-singer alias: Billy Three-Sticks).
Samantha Cicciaro and Charlie Weisbarger are two lonely Long Island teenagers whose interest in the punk scene leads to their involvement with the Post-Humanist Phalanx: an anarchist group which dabbles in everything from arson to mass destruction. And there's Richard Groskoph, a journalist whose article about the city's Fourth of July fireworks turns into an investigation of the shooting that brings all the book's characters together.
This roll call barely scratches the surface. There are at least 20 characters whose minds we get to know in a close third-person narration, and it is quite astounding that so many of them are pungently realised from the outside and inside. On Sol, a burly punk, "you could actually see a calculation lope across his face, where on most people's it would have flitted". After a gig, Charlie Weisbarger "felt himself contracting painfully back to the size of his regular body". Sam Cicciaro, before being dumped by an older man, shows how vulnerable and human she is when she thinks: "How serious could it be, if he'd stopped to buy nuts?"
