A big, dense, frustrating novel stuffed full of brilliant writing and excessive minutiae in almost equal measure, Garth Risk Hallberg’s follow-up to 2015′s City on Fire is a book at odds with itself. It races down avenues of sparkling prose hot on the heels of wickedly self-destructive and erratically self-aware protagonists. It is solidly structured and plays effective games with visual interventions (such as chat message bubbles, photographs and fonts).
It should purr, but instead, it stalls out every few pages to peer forensically at each lane closure sign, each playlist, each bustling street corner that it comes across. It is pitched as a road-trip into Great American Novel territory, but one cannot help but feel that Hallberg has missed a turn-off somewhere.
Pull back from this overemphasis on granularity, however, and The Second Coming reveals itself as the tale of two vivid, damaged characters. The first, Jolie, is a precocious but nihilistic New York teen lately in trouble for underage drinking and underwhelming grades. She drops her phone off a subway platform, climbs down to retrieve it, and is almost hit by a train. Is this brush with death actually a cry for help? Certainly the second protagonist, her father Ethan, seems to think so. A well-intentioned but feckless resident of a California addiction clinic, Ethan sees himself as the only person who can help the daughter he abandoned three years earlier. Thus he returns to the east coast and the wreckage of the life he left behind.
The crux of The Second Coming lies in teasing out the similarities between wayward parent and troubled child, with flashes of Hallberg’s virtuoso sensibility on display throughout. He treats us to one absolute cracker of an observation after another (Funny, how the nurses at Bellevue kept turning into one another when you weren’t looking, like a single, seraphic creature with a range of possible faces but a multitude of busy wings), yet these are weighed down by reams of extraneous detail that dullen what genuine literary fireworks are to be enjoyed here.
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This editorial gulf between the reader and the author’s obvious talent results in a novel that creaks under its own weight. At half the size this could have been twice as powerful.
