OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile
Rebecca Lowman carries the largest part of the narration of this nearly forty-hour audiobook. And while Lowman obviously works tirelessly to infuse an emotional element into each of the characters, her great efforts cannot overcome the author's excesses, which leave the listener, at best, apathetic. Lowman accentuates Hallberg's elegant writing style, but even her meticulous use of inflection and tone can't prevent the story from being muddled in detail and development. Lowman's range and insight allow her to uniquely vocalize each character, but they’re still, basically, unlikable. Tristan Morris and Bronson Pinchot offer equally strong performances; it's a shame they were wasted on this undeserving novel. J.F. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
06/01/2015
Hallberg’s maniacally detailed, exhaustingly clever depiction of 1970s New York is packed with urban angst, intellectual energy, and sinister pitfalls, much like the city it evokes. This epic of drugs, sex, and rock and roll combines fiction and new journalistic accounts of real events, with a character’s typed manuscript drafts (spill marks included), hand-written diaries, notebooks, photographs, cartoons, drawings, homework, and personal correspondence. A cast of characters drawn from all social strata features William Hamilton-Sweeney, artist and sometime heroin addict, once heir to a fortune, once lead guitarist for the post-humanist rock band Ex Post Facto; and Sam Cicciaro, the girl everyone finds irresistible, discovered half-dead in Central Park by William’s lover, Mercer. The search to identify Sam’s attacker is one of several story lines tying the ambitious work together; another is Mercer’s attempt, propelled by William’s sister, Regan, to bring William back into the family fold as their father’s business collapses and troubles in the family mount. Charlie, an alienated teenager who becomes a rock band groupie, falls for Sam. Meanwhile Richard Kosgroth, veteran journalist and Capote wannabe, interviews Sam’s father, New York’s fireworks king. Seventies survivors will not be surprised when city residents come together during the ’77 blackout. Readers wishing to wallow in cultural trivia will find much to savor in Hallberg’s all-encompassing, occasionally overwritten effort, but others will be left to wonder how so much energy could generate so little light. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A remarkably assured, multivalent tale . . . an epic panorama of musicians, writers, and power brokers and the surprising ways they connect . . . The story never feels overwritten, and the plotlines interlace without feeling pat . . . At times the novel feels like a metafictional tribute to America’s finest doorstop manufacturers, circa 1970 to the present: Price (street-wise cops), Wolfe (top-tier wealth), Franzen (busted families), Wallace (the seductions of drugs and pop culture), and DeLillo (the unseen forces behind everything). That’s not to say Hallberg has written a pastiche . . . As his various plotlines braid tighter during the July 1977 blackout, his novel becomes an ambitious showpiece for just how much the novel can contain without busting apart. The very-damn-good American novel."
James Coan, Library Journal (starred)
“Epic, well-written, and highly entertaining . . . Throughout, Hallberg expertly handles the multiple shifts in perspective, vibrantly portraying a specific time and place and creating memorable characters.”
Library Journal
★ 08/01/2015
This epic, well-written, and highly entertaining first novel is set in New York City from around Christmas 1976 to the blackout of July 1977. Years earlier, wealthy widower William Hamilton-Sweeney had become engaged to a woman whose wheeler-dealer brother takes over the family's business empire and pushes aside William's children, Regan and William III. By late 1976, Regan is separated from her husband, while her brother has emerged from the Sixties with a heroin habit and is alienated from the entire family. He's also pursuing a relationship with Mercer Goodman, an intelligent young black man from Georgia. Meanwhile, remnants of the band William once belonged to have holed up on Manhattan's Lower East Side and are plotting some kind of a revolution, possibly violent. Lost souls attracted to the band include Charlie Weisbarger and Samantha Cicciaro, both of whom are central to several of the plot threads interwoven within these many pages. It all comes together or unravels on the wild, riotous night of the blackout, probably one of the low points in recent New York City history and vividly depicted in a suitable denouement for this anticipated blockbuster of a novel. VERDICT Throughout, Hallberg expertly handles the multiple shifts in perspective, vibrantly portraying a specific time and place and creating memorable characters—especially Charlie and Regan, a complicated mess of a poor little rich girl who manages to be heroic in her own way—all wandering the vast, ongoing American dreamscape that is New York City. [See Prepub Alert, 4/13/15.]—James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile
Rebecca Lowman carries the largest part of the narration of this nearly forty-hour audiobook. And while Lowman obviously works tirelessly to infuse an emotional element into each of the characters, her great efforts cannot overcome the author's excesses, which leave the listener, at best, apathetic. Lowman accentuates Hallberg's elegant writing style, but even her meticulous use of inflection and tone can't prevent the story from being muddled in detail and development. Lowman's range and insight allow her to uniquely vocalize each character, but they’re still, basically, unlikable. Tristan Morris and Bronson Pinchot offer equally strong performances; it's a shame they were wasted on this undeserving novel. J.F. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-05-06
Rough-edged mid-1970s New York provides the backdrop for an epic panorama of musicians, writers, and power brokers and the surprising ways they connect. New Year's Eve 1976: Sam, a fanzine author and hanger-on in the Manhattan punk scene, abandons her plan to attend a concert and instead heads to Central Park, where she's later discovered shot and clinging to life. Why'd she head uptown? Who shot her? Thereby hangs a remarkably assured, multivalent tale that strives to explore multiple strata of Manhattan life with photographic realism. Most prominent in this busy milieu are William, the scion of a banking family who's abandoned money for the sake of music, art, and drugs; Nicky, the coke-fueled head of an East Village squat who delivers motor-mouthed pronunciamentos on post-humanism and is curiously in the know about arson in the Bronx; Richard, a magazine journalist whose profile of Sam's father, the head of a fireworks firm, leads to suspicion that there's a bigger story to be told. With more than 900 pages at his disposal, Hallberg (A Field Guide to the North American Family, 2007) gives his characters plenty of breathing room, but the story never feels overwritten, and the plotlines interlace without feeling pat. One theme of the novel is the power that stories, true or false, have over our lives, so it's hard to miss other writers' influences here. At times the novel feels like a metafictional tribute to America's finest doorstop manufacturers, circa 1970 to the present: Price (street-wise cops), Wolfe (top-tier wealth), Franzen (busted families), Wallace (the seductions of drugs and pop culture), and DeLillo (the unseen forces behind everything). That's not to say he's written a pastiche, but as his various plotlines braid tighter during the July 1977 blackout, his novel becomes an ambitious showpiece for just how much the novel can contain without busting apart. The very-damn-good American novel.
