Garth Risk Hallberg

The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg is a recommended family drama that examines the minutiae regarding the broken relationship and lives of a father and his teenage daughter.

In 2011 thirteen-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks and has a near-miss with a subway train when she jumps down to recover it. The thoughtless act was likely due to her drinking, but she is having other emotional issues. It does bring her estranged father back into her life. Her father, Ethan Aspern is a recovering addict and convicted felon. He believes he can help her navigate her problems and set her straight so he returns home to NYC.

The narrative negotiates between multiple time periods and perspectives including the present and in flashbacks following Ethan's relationship with Jolie's mother, Sarah Kupferberg, relationships with parents, his addiction and more. There are many, many details and emotional insights into the characters. There are many keen insights into the raw emotions of both father and daughter, who share, in part, a bond over anxiety and addiction.

But the novel itself is just too, too much. Too full of elaborate prose, too meandering, too long, too expansive, too detailed, too emotional, too overworked, too slow paced, and, well, you get my point. From the synopsis, this is seemingly a novel I would normally relish. Instead it felt like I slogged through it, starting and stopping while losing interest in the characters or the plot. Tighten it up, refine the focus, pick up the pacing, and make us care about these characters. Thanks to Knopf for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.
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I finally tackled this book, which has been on my Nook since the beginning of the year. It's huge, although I hardly ever find that daunting. I read the entire Outlander series in less than three weeks during a time I was very busy at work and doing a lot of long hours, and each book was of epic length. Same with the Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series. The story mainly took place in 1976-1977, mainly in New York City (where I worked) and Long Island (where I lived and had grown up), so much of it was familiar, perhaps even more so because I got married in February 1977 and was just beginning my grown up life. Certainly the blackout of 1977, which I observed from a strange place (our apartment was in Nassau County, so unaffected by Con Ed's failure, but through a quirk of post-WWII building, the houses had been moved to make way for the Cross Island Parkway and our little three-block island of power sat surrounded by darkness that hot July evening in the Summer of Sam. Certainly the decrepitation of New York City -- I worked way downtown on Water Street. Certainly the growing restlessness of the masses in post-Nixon, post-Vietnam America. The gas shortage. The financial crises. Gay activism. The birth of punk and disco, neither of which strummed my soul, although I would later come to be appreciate some punk music. So much of the setting was familiar and well set by Hallberg. But. He seemed to be channeling Tom Wolfe at his most pretentious. I kept thinking of "Bonfire of the Vanities" as I read (which I did like, despite its pretention), feeling as if a lot of this was written with Roget's at Hallberg's elbow to find those big words that could easily have been left simpler. I also felt he was trying to be David Foster Wallace, whose "Infinite Jest" I have started reading three or four times, but seem to give up around the same place. I usually read books in an two or three evenings, and even large ambitious ones like this in three or four days at the most, particularly when I start on a weekend, but it took me seven because I lost patience a few times. I often find the device of switching between past, present, and future jarring, not in a good way. And in having so many characters, I did not find any one of them particularly well developed, although there was a good sense of a few of them (not the female characters, sadly). On the other hand, I did want to learn how the story ended: What would become of of Samantha; Charlie; Billy/William; Regan & Keith and their progeny; the Demon Brother (he was one of the poorly developed characters, in my opinion, but maybe his spectral presence was deliberate); Felicia (almost unknowable). Pulaski (somewhat well drawn). And there are too many neat coincidences and convoluted intersections. To me, the book fell short of the hype, but Hallberg can tell a story and his writing had moments of brilliance -- a well-turned phrase or two or three -- and it was therefore a decent first novel of a writer who I will watch.… (more)