The Unprecedented Garth Risk Hallberg

City On Fire, a debut novel, generated a headline-making $2 million bidding war. Which means quite a lot is riding on its 36-year-old author. Believe it or not, hes chasing even bigger things.

- Boris Kachka

Never wanted to be the guy wearing a T-shirt that read ask me about my novel,” says Garth Risk Hallberg. One August evening in 2012, he was that guy. He’d been invited to the wedding of writer-banker Gary Sernovitz and academic Molly Pulda at the Bowery Hotel. Among his tablemates were Diana Miller, his future editor; Tom Bissell, whom he’d just reviewed in the Times; and Chris Parris-Lamb, a young literary agent whose recent success with Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was well known to all—including the writer seated across from him. A souvenir “dictionary” defined each guest. Hallberg’s entry read: “Critic-novelist certain he will win the Postmodernist Fiction Trivia Contest to be held in the men’s bathroom at 11:59 tonight.”

At the time, the “novelist” part was notional. Hallberg’s wife was the only one at the wedding who had seen the thousand-page stack of text and graphics that would become City on Fire, a sprawling, populous mystery culminating in New York’s 1977 blackout, for which Knopf would later pay $2 million—probably the highest North American advance ever for a debut novel. Hallberg had been thinking about it for nine years and quietly writing it for five. But at the wedding, he was just a gangly 33-year-old blogger-critic with two kids and five figures of debt, a junior-varsity member of Table 14.