For Mr. Hallberg, the ’70s were a sort of inflection point for New York — when its fate seemed as bleak as Detroit’s would be decades later, and before a bubble of wealth encased much of the city. And his youthful characters, too, are at pivotal moments in their lives.

Image Garth Risk Hallberg’s first novel, “City on Fire,” is set in 1970s New York, when the city was on the brink of bankruptcy.





Credit... Alex Welsh for The New York Times

Some struggle to get out from under the umbrella of their parents’ expectations and balance the equation between their dreams of artistic success and the numbing day-to-day reality of being ignored and poor. Others, slightly older, are trying to navigate their way through the maze of marriage and the new reality of being parents themselves. The public and the private, the political and the personal are intimately connected in “City on Fire,” braided together by Mr. Hallberg so that characters’ inner conflicts are mirrored by the tumult in the streets, and their self-doubts reflect larger, communal suspicions that the center cannot hold, that things are indeed falling apart.

Samantha Cicciaro, the teenager left for dead in Central Park, is the fulcrum of this novel’s plot, but she is only one player in a sprawling ensemble cast. Sam and her friend Charlie Weisbarger, we learn, have been hanging out with a group of anarchists and punk rockers downtown, presided over by the nihilistic Nicky Chaos. Sam has also been having an affair with a Wall Street trader named Keith Lamplighter, the estranged husband of Regan, an heir to the great Hamilton-Sweeney fortune and the estranged sister of William Hamilton-Sweeney III, an emotionally withholding musician and painter, who himself is the estranged boyfriend of Mercer, an aspiring novelist who, like many a bildungsroman hero before him, has left a small town to move to New York to try to write the Great American Novel.

Like Mercer, Mr. Hallberg believes in “the old idea” that the novel might “teach us about something. About everything.” And he seems to want to make his own magnum opus “as big as life,” encompassing the city in all its gradations and complexities, and one family’s shared longings and grievances as they are handed down one generation to the next. Too big at times: “City on Fire” can occasionally feel overmarinated in research (the author having seemingly inhaled whole books like “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire,” Will Hermes’s terrific portrait of the New York music scene in the mid-70s), and the reader can’t help feeling that a few judicious nips and tucks might have dispersed the longueurs that waft around the third quarter of the book.

Still, such flaws are easily steamrollered by the velocity of Mr. Hallberg’s narrative and his assurance at drawing upon his XXL tool kit as a storyteller: a love of language and the handsprings he can make it perform; a bone-deep knowledge of his characters’ inner lives that’s as unerring as that of the young Salinger; an instinctive gift for spinning suspense not just out of dovetailing plotlines and odd Dickensian coincidences but also from secrets buried in his characters’ pasts.