City on Fire
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473549616
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Garth Risk Hallberg 2007, 2011, 2017
Cover design and endpaper art by Oliver Munday
Cover photograph © Shane Lavalette
Garth Risk Hallberg has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Vintage in 2017
Originally published in slightly different form by Mark Batty Publisher, New York, in 2007 and 2011
The author is grateful to Buzz Poole, Christopher D. Salyers, Cassandra J. Pappas, Oliver Munday, and all the artists who generously contributed their time and talents—and especially to Sean Peterson.
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
“A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.”
—James Agee
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
About the Photographers
Also by Garth Risk Hallberg
Title Page
Epigraph
Two Representative Families
How to Use This Book
Adolescence
Adulthood
Angst
Boredom
Chemistry
Commitment
Consensus
Custody Battle
Depression
Discretion
Divorce
Entertainment
Family Values
Fidelity
Fiscal Responsibility
Freedom
Friend of The Family
Gravity
Grief
Guilt
Habits, Bad
Habits, Good
Heirloom
Hierarchy
Holiday
Home
Infidelity
Innocence
Integrity
Intimacy
Irony
Love
Material
Maternal Instinct
Maturity
Meaning, Search For
Midlife Crisis
Moment of Clarity
Mortgage
Mythology
Nature vs. Nurture
Optimism
Partings (Amicable and Acrimonious)
Phase
Privacy
Providence
Questions, Nagging
Rebellion
Recognition
Reconciliation
Resignation
Rumor
Sacrifice
Secret
Security
Sibling Rivalry
Tantrum
Tenderness
Tradition
Uncertainty
Vulnerability
Whatever
Youth
Copyright
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
It is sincerely hoped that this field guide will prove to be of value for all readers. To that end, several methods have been provided for navigation.
The photographs in this edition are the work of a number of artists, whose names and accomplishments are charted here. Each photograph is meant to illuminate the preceding entry, and the North American Family as a whole.
It’s the boltcutters that open up a hole in the storm fence just big enough for a skinny boy to slip through. It’s the backpack in which spraycans are rattling. One knows what one is doing, weaving back and forth among the dark hulks of traincars; it’s the rails one must be careful to avoid. It’s the memory of batteries blown up in earlier, smaller instances of life beyond the law. Or beyond the row of junked cars, the newer ones the mayor has pronounced paint-resistant. It’s the rush of blood in the ears. The image on the backs of the eyes. It’s the sky over the city sprayed violet, like the inside of one’s heart—cloudy, brooding, still aglow after distant explosions.
Though often identified with Freedom, the wild Adolescence more closely resembles a Search for Meaning.
SEE ALSO:
•ANGST •BOREDOM •CHEMISTRY•GRAVITY •NATURE VS. NURTURE •REBELLION•TENDERNESS •WHATEVER
Funerals weren’t so different from elementary school. There were rules you learned sooner or later, the easy way or the hard way. Sit still. Listen. Offer your wife or daughter a hand to hold, as though holding hands were something your family still did. Squeeze to signify you might cry at what seem to be the appropriate moments. If you think you might actually cry, wear sunglasses. It was grim but true: like school and work and everything else in Jack Hungate’s life, the funeral had eventually lost its novelty and become just another thing to plug into the day-planner, and by the end of his forties, he was averaging one or two every year: coworkers, fraternity brothers, relatives he’d forgotten he had. Neighbors. The sun was shining on the day they committed Frank Harrison to the earth, for example, and as Jack gazed through tinted lenses at the glowing blond hair on his own wife’s and daughter’s heads and at his son’s nascent sideburns, he realized he’d never really known the man, despite having seen him at least once a week for the last decade—a total of hundreds of neighborly interactions. Several times each summer, Frank had brought his family over to barbecue and swim. Their kids were the same age, roughly. A memory floated up out of the haze: Frank Harrison emerging from the backyard pool, half-naked and hulking, his booming voice advertising his kingdom for a towel and a beer. And it dawned on Jack that it could just as easily have been his own blood vessels bursting. It could have been his heart. He struggled to remain somber. He looked out across the sea of stricken faces toward the faraway silver Sound. Incense was on the air. An eerie silence obtained, as after snowfall, broken only by the priest’s litany and the drone of incoming planes and the widow’s choked breathing. It could have been me, Jack thought, but it wasn’t. A month later, when he and Elizabeth separated, he would find himself cursing the empty decorum of the country club set. But it served him well that day; no one could tell that inside he was rejoicing. Or that, although his heart now went out to Marnie and the two Harrison kids, Lacey and whatshisname—Tommy—he’d never really cared for the dead man anyway.
Adulthood can be distinguished from Maturity by its tendency to cling to the chrysalis. On occasion, Adulthood has even been known to disappear back into Adolescence following an unsettling foray into the world.
SEE ALSO:
•DISCRETION •DIVORCE •FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY•FREEDOM •MIDLIFE CRISIS •MORTGAGE•SACRIFICE •TRADITION
Gabriel Hungate began to experiment at age thirteen, without the knowledge of his father or mother or younger sister. Described variously as “headstrong,” “hard to peg,” and “persuasive,” he had long been an object of interest among the neighborhood males two to three years his senior. When in a local backyard one offered him a modified aluminum can and the remnants of a “dime bag,” he accepted immediately. It might just as easily have started with a Mini-Thin or a dose of Ritalin or a drink of tequila; in the blurred tumble of months that followed Gabriel speculated that, contrary to the rigid verticality of the “gateway hypothesis,” stimulants and sedatives were networked horizontally, each linked to every other. Alcohol, nicotine, and cannabis, because the most readily available, were the intoxicants most often used among his cohort and by the subject himself. Typical symptoms of substance abuse (sullenness, academic underachievement, social withdrawal) were masked in Gabriel by a simultaneous disturbance in his domestic situation. His appetite for “downers” was well within the statistical mean for his sex and age; his tendencies to ingest in solitude and to keep the frequency and intensity of his intoxication secret even from his peers were outliers. Gabriel tended to conduct his experiments in his bedroom or the basement recreation room, and to further gauge his limits by playing music at high volume and sitting for hours in the dark in a state of self-recrimination. Even in the “kegger” setting, he drifted toward seclusion, where, he believed, anyone who cared to find him would come looking. No one came looking. Also notable, given the pattern of abuse over several years, was the abrupt cessation of these behaviors. Following the construction of a “graffiti wall” in the backyard of his mother’s house, Gabriel Hungate, for reasons beyond the explanatory power of this study, gave up narcotics at an age (17) when most of his peers were intensifying their explorations. He began, instead, to paint (although, significantly, the patterns of withdrawal and self-reproach and heavy tobacco use would continue right up until his accident).
The fossil record shows the juvenile strain of Angst to be a relative newcomer. Possibly the product of crossbreeding between Boredom and Depression, it made its first documented appearance fewer than five hundred years ago.
SEE ALSO:
•ADOLESCENCE •CHEMISTRY •DIVORCE•GRIEF •LOVE •MEANING, SEARCH FOR•PHASE •QUESTIONS, NAGGING