“In the song, it seemed to me that the ghosts of these possibilities—of this messy, funky, ruinous, dangerous, alive, passionate, hopeful, meaningful, creative place that was New York in the seventies—had magically transmitted themselves out to all points of the map and sustained generations of teenagers since. And once again, we were in a conversation about the relative merits of freedom and security, risk and vulnerability. The whole book came to me in the space of that song, like a supernova in my brain.”

Off the bus, Hallberg sat on a bench in Union Square, scribbling notes. “The size of it was frightening to me. I felt like an inferior make of electronic product being zapped with way more current than I was designed to handle.” He put the notebook in a drawer and didn’t open it again until after they’d moved and he’d finished his M.F.A. at NYU, where he studied with the late E. L. Doctorow and Brian Morton. “He was always trying something new in his stories—different voices, different settings, different ways of structuring a narrative,” remembers Morton. “And he had no interest in being told how terrific he was. He was like a scientist dispassionately gathering information about his experiments: What he was interested in was what he could do to improve.”

Artistic restlessness finally led Hallberg to open that drawer. “I thought, If I was only able to write one book, if the writing I was doing now was the only writing I would ever get to do, what would it be?” Expecting to start cold, he found instead that the world he’d imagined four years earlier had begun to eerily mirror the one he was currently living in. Bicycling to the library to read the daily papers from three decades before, he filled one notebook after another, finding the parallels increasingly resonant. In the fall of 2008, he was coming out of a Cecily Brown exhibition when news broke of the stock-market collapse. “As I wrote, I was thinking that we were living through a deferred crisis, the cost of a revolution that didn’t come to be.”

For all its ingenuous charm, a mounting distrust pervades City on Fire, in which the illusions of the previous generation hover ominously. The example of Hallberg’s father, who published little after his initial burst of success, has fueled the author’s wariness of publicity—he avoids social media and doesn’t have an Internet browser on his computer or phone; he checks email on his wife’s computer—as well as his fierce discipline. The morning after he finished a draft of all but the last section of the novel, Elise delivered their first son; the next day, Hallberg was back at his desk, writing the blackout scenes that serve as the novel’s otherworldly climax. The book sold as his father was dying of cancer. “I think there would have been a time when my publishing a book might have been a source of ambivalence for him,” says Hallberg. “As it happened, it was a great gift. But it was so much more his dream than it was mine.”

City on Fire book Photo: Gorman Studio

Benchmark shattering book deals aside, a 927-page novel is never the dream of a perfect novel. Older readers may quibble about verisimilitude—Hallberg’s characters have a decidedly twenty-first-century habit of stepping outside to smoke (it’s worth noting that both his agent and editor are also in their 30s). The novel overturns some of the old mythologies while utilizing others—violent acts against women as plot points; an evil step-uncle prone to saying things like “piffle.” Hallberg doesn’t burn down the house so much as ask us to reexamine its foundations by the light of another time. He’s in good company: Authors from Tolstoy to Denis Johnson have novelized the events of decades before to comment on the present day. And while a great deal of period fiction induces a look-how-far-we’ve-come smugness—call it the Mad Men effect—the power of City on Fire lies in the skill with which it does precisely the reverse. The last morning we meet to talk, the Supreme Court is legalizing gay marriage while black churches smolder and abortion rights crumble. What year is it?

A big novel, like a big city, reminds us that, behind the corporate facades and cronuts, we remain deeply interconnected—to each other but also to our collective past. Our actions have repercussions on those with whom we share space; our stories reverberate. Hallberg and I pause in a hipster-filled Stuyvesant Park, where New York’s ghosts, and Hallberg’s, collide once more. “At seventeen, this was paradise,” he remembers. Twenty years later, it’s legend.

Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick

Menswear Editor: Michael Philouze

Grooming: Joanna Pensinger Ford

Set Design: Mary Howard Studio