If works of fiction have lost their supreme place in our cultural pantheon, they’ve also grown infinitely more numerous. Not coincidentally, this shift corresponded with a radical consolidation of the publishing industry. A handful of companies now releases tens of thousands of books each year in a process closer to the production of Happy Meals than the crafting of masterpieces.
Remarkably, when Schmitz was working on Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain,” it was her only editorial project. Such concentration was rare then; it’s unheard of today under a business model banking on the continual release of bestsellers and copycat stories. None of this is meant to imply that astonishingly talented writers aren’t still working, but the modern-day book editor is less like Schmitz poring over Frazier’s manuscript and more like Lucy and Ethel trying to wrap all those chocolates.
Which brings us to the editorial tragedy of “The Second Coming,” the latest novel by Garth Risk Hallberg. An epigraph from “Ulysses” is an early warning. If there were ever a case to be made for the resurrection of Maxwell Perkins, it’s this overstuffed book, which might have soared had it been piloted by an editor willing to throw extra baggage overboard.
Superfluity is not a surprise hazard in Hallberg’s work. Everything about his 2015 novel, “City on Fire,” was extravagant: its 900-page length, its sprawling New York plot, its vast slate of characters, even its ridiculous $2 million advance. But that novel was pumped up by a pair of indefatigable lungs that could keep the whole apparatus inflated. If there were extraneous ornaments — and, oh, were there! — they tended to snap off and fly away as the story stormed into that fateful night in the summer of 1977 when New York City went dark.
But now with “The Second Coming,” Hallberg has slowed his pace and shrunk his central cast, while allowing his deafening engines to keep gunning. The effect feels like taking an F-35 fighter jet to pick up some gum at Walgreens.
At its heart, the story here is one of domestic despair. A 13-year-old New Yorker named Jolie starts to listen to a bootleg copy of Prince’s “The Second Coming” when she accidentally drops her iPhone on the subway tracks. Before anyone can stop her, she climbs down to retrieve it. But as the next train approaches, Jolie considers the whole dismal ordeal of her life. “All she had to do to change that was to stay here with the calm,” the narrator says, “to close her eyes and still the grasshopper mind and see her research through to what now seemed its logical conclusion: that even a nothing was preferable to this something.”
Fortunately, a bystander pulls her up and out of the way of the subway car at the last second. Her mother wants to imagine that this near-fatal encounter was merely a lapse of judgment — Teenagers and their phones! — but we know Jolie has been drinking and feeling dangerously depressed. Those are conditions well understood by her estranged father, Ethan — “the lord of misrule” — who’s been trying to rebuild his life in California. When he hears of his daughter’s troubles, he recognizes the symptoms of his own drug addiction and self-destruction. Though he hasn’t seen Jolie for several years, he becomes convinced that he can finally help her, that he can prove to her that life is worth the struggle. “Certain kinds of hopelessness,” he claims, “are almost a precondition for a second act.”
Warmed by that naive resurgence of fatherly concern, Ethan comes to New York and — without his ex-wife’s permission — takes Jolie on a Thanksgiving trip so that they can reconnect with each other and his roots in Maryland. As divorced-dad adventures go, this is a madcap opera of dysfunction set in the key of an Amber Alert. Jolie has grown so angry and depressed that she refuses to speak the entire time, and nothing goes as hoped. But the journey provides lots of opportunities for Ethan to reflect on his upbringing, his precipitous slide into addiction and his doomed marriage.
What all his rumination doesn’t provide, however, is much insight into Jolie. Although we’re reading what’s meant to be her later-in-life memoir — interspersed with “too-long letters” from Ethan — young Jolie remains not only mute but inscrutable. She may be the love of her father’s life, but Ethan remains the love of this novel’s story, which fawns on the handsome ne’er-do-well with a level of devotion that Rabbit Angstrom could only have dreamed of. Indeed, Ethan — “an overgrown child, with a child’s innocence, a child’s inability to be blamed” — is prancing along that golden literary highway trod by generations of frustrating but gosh-darn-it lovable American male antiheroes.
That’s fine, if a little tedious this late in the day, but the real problem with this novel, delivered as what it calls “slabs of memoir,” is Hallberg’s relentless urge to digress, to lather moments with excess observations and observations with superfluous verbiage. For instance — chosen at random, I swear — at one point Ethan remembers his sister working as a waitress: “On the wall by the walk-in fridge at the restaurant was an honest-to-God time clock and a pocketboard of manila cards. To mark your hours, you found the card with your name, inserted it into the clock’s slot, and waited for a jolt like the world’s tiniest handgun to leave a new stamp: precise to the second, if slightly misaligned with the pre-printed grid.” Readers who don’t earn $2 million per book are unlikely to be as dazzled by an ordinary time clock, but many pages of “The Second Coming” are larded with such surplus cleverness.
And for much of the book’s impressive length, the plot moves forward so slowly and with so little urgency that some of the more dispensable flashbacks struck me as almost vindictive. I often felt like I’d been reading “The Second Coming” since the first one. Weirdly, halfway through the novel, Jolie breaks through the fourth wall to acknowledge that the reader may be baffled: “Let me just pause here to say that I haven’t forgotten you’re in the room, too. I can even feel you wondering, like, ‘What is happening here?’” But as any addict knows, admitting you have a problem is only the first step.
Are there flashes of brilliance here? More than flashes; whole storms of genius. But my irritation is piqued by the fact that so many wonderful, witty, poignant sections are buried in this lumpy novel. When Hallberg’s style catches gear on a worthy subject, the whole apparatus suddenly hums to life. The memory of Ethan and his wife struggling to cope with a new child after 9/11 is devastating. Near the end, a long chapter of vignettes scrambled in time is equally demanding and awesome.
Somewhere out there is a Hallberg Whisperer up to the task of editing him, someone who can convince this 45-year-old genius that he no longer needs to prove to us that he’s the smartest kid in the class.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”
