THE SECOND COMING, by Garth Risk Hallberg
Garth Risk Hallberg’s ambitious but uneven and exhausting new novel, “The Second Coming,” takes its title from an unreleased live album by Prince. One of the book’s central characters, a 13-year-old girl named Jolie Aspern, is on a Manhattan subway platform listening to a bootleg version when her phone slips from her hand and clatters onto the tracks below.
She climbs down after it. A train heaves into view. Oh no! Jolie is rescued, but she is hurt and shaken up. Was she suicidal or just foolish? The next day she is the subject of a New York Post headline: “APP-ETITE FOR DESTRUCTION.”
This early scene is one of many needle drops in Hallberg’s multigenerational and music-drenched novel, which is set primarily in 2011 but frequently flashes forward a decade, and backward even further. By the end, the novel has become a mixtape of sorts, with sections named after songs.
“The Second Coming” never becomes a great rock or music novel. Hallberg doesn’t make you feel what his characters are getting out of these songs. But this is certainly a novel that, to annex a thought from Annie Proulx in “The Shipping News,” makes you realize that one of the bummers of existence is that “there is no background music.”
This is Hallberg’s second novel, if you don’t count “A Field Guide to the North American Family,” a 2007 novella. His first, “City on Fire,” a sprawling New York City story set in part during the blackout of July 13, 1977, made an impact when it was published in 2015. It made best-seller lists. Frank Rich gave it a yea-saying review on the cover of The Times Book Review, though he also had a lot of caveats.
Speaking of The New York Post, it ran a “City on Fire” review, too. Its headline was: “Overhyped novel ‘City on Fire’ is a steaming pile of literary dung.” My opinion of the novel is closer to Rich’s, but The Post’s dissent registers with me. Hallberg is an intelligent writer, but he’s a wild and frequently sloppy one. His narratives don’t click into gear; his curveball only sometimes makes it over the plate.
Jolie, the girl who jumped on the subway tracks, is one of the most precocious eighth graders in recent literary history. She wears black and quotes Philip Larkin on how your parents mess you up. She name-checks Itzhak Perlman. She goes alone to a zendo to work on re-centering. Before long she will dye her hair pink, give herself a mental patient’s haircut, get a lot of piercings and stop talking altogether. She’ll drop acid.
She’s already a pint-size rock ’n’ roll survivor. As The Onion once joked about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love’s daughter, she seems to have been born ready to enter prehab.
She is her father’s daughter. Ethan Aspern is a washed-up actor who has been arrested on drug charges, gone through 12-step programs and burned every bridge he’s crossed. He walks around uttering things like “I’m only going to let you down.” He is not lying. He is scruffy, outstandingly handsome and has a heart of gold that’s visible from a satellite. When Ethan learns about Jolie’s accident, he comes back into her life after many years away and hopes to make amends, if he is not arrested first for abducting her.
Ethan has a tangled back story, with complicated parents of his own. His mother is a serious artist. And the novel summarizes his father’s story this way: “Naval Academy, Yale Divinity, a summer sailing for William F. Buckley of all people. And then right back to Annapolis for a chaplain gig.” Little of this material is picked up in the novel. This information is an indication of Hallberg’s flickering interest in big, interlocking American themes. Scenes play across Sept. 11 and Occupy Wall Street, and take us into Covid.
Hallberg is often at his best when he’s not reaching for big effects, when he gives himself room to breathe. Here’s Ethan defending his hometown, Ocean City, N.J.:
Like, did the Hamptons have stand-mounted binoculars that offered up only darkness unless you paid a quarter? Or the game with the giant mallets and the flying rubber frogs? Did the Hamptons have that? How about not one but two amusement parks called the Jolly Roger, each with a Tilt-a-Whirl so ultra-sketch you had to sign a waiver?
This novel’s scope and ambition are reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s novels. But Hallberg’s writing is more in the mold of Richard Ford. Like Ford, he’s enamored of New Jersey settings and lets crucial scenes play out over holidays, for supplemental resonance. He’s given to epigrammatic summing-up statements every other page or so. Ford’s are better; they’re crisper bites of the apple.
We follow Jolie and Ethan around. The narrative baton is passed among unreliable narrators. A lot of the sentences and dialogue are of the sort that might sound good in a Steve Earle song (“But what if I were to try calling on your better angels?”) but not so much in cold print, especially when they pile up.
Ethan is a familiar figure. He’s a beautiful loser, an amiable screw-up of the genus Jim Harrison once classified as the “nifty guy at loose ends.” We know this creature from Thomas McGuane’s novels, and from Barry Hannah’s, and from Harrison’s, among other writers. Hallberg’s amiable screw-up, unlike those in his predecessors’ fiction, is never much fun to be around.
Ethan is almost entirely sexless as well, which gives the novel a deracinated feeling. Like Ryan Gosling in “Barbie,” he seems to have only a smooth plastic panel down there.
Katie Roiphe has written about how a now not-so-young generation of male writers have jettisoned their carnal appetites for empathetic cuddling. The critic Elaine Blair, too, has thought through the new skittishness about sex in fiction written by men, the “fearful suspicion that if a man gets what he wants, sexually speaking, he is probably exploiting someone.”
Younger women hurl themselves in front of Ethan, who is still in his early 30s for much of the novel. When he does sleep with one, even after getting to know her, the vibe is one of disgust and sharp regret. It’s as if he has run over a small animal with a lawn mower.
He blames his weakness on his surroundings: “Apparently he’d been in California long enough to weaken a little on the numinous, the vibrational, and he couldn’t help but think that the sex was somehow related to his feeling of having upset the power balance between them.” Jolie’s first stab at sexual contact is porn-like, horrible, pitilessly bleak.
This novel, like Ethan’s life, lurches sideways. There are many, many characters — siblings, parents, parole officers, lovers, spouses, drug dealers, old friends. There is little sense of momentum; the pages never turn themselves. It is so intensely written that it gave me a headache, as if I had been grinding my teeth. I was glad when it was over.
THE SECOND COMING | By Garth Risk Hallberg | Knopf | 586 pp. | $32
