Monsterpieces: Big City, Big Data

Garth Risk Hallberg and Joshua Cohen

[These reviews of two self-consciously Big Novels—Hallberg’s City on Fire and Cohen’s Book of Numbers—were published in 2015. If you missed the novels back then, you may want to give Hallberg and Cohen a look, for I think they are two of the few American novelists most likely to write a Monsterpiece in the future—even if their more recent work doesn’t evidence that kind of achievement. Hallberg’s The Second Coming received mixed reviews in 2024. Cohen’s The Netanyahus won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022; I didn’t understand why. Monsterpieces require time, and time requires money. City on Fire became a TV series; the Pulitzer pays out. Perhaps Hallberg and Cohen already have a thousand pages of monstrous new fiction on their hard drives.

I suppose I should go back, re-read, and re-judge these two, but am instead posting these old, thick reviews and offering you the chance (or challenge) to read the novels and comment on what you think here on Monsterpieces. For recent subscribers to the site, the reviews do discuss in passing some earlier monsterpieces and my concept of the systems novel.]

Garth Risk Hallberg

City on Fire

In this first novel set in the New York City of the late 1970’s, a central artist character nails together a “four-by-four frame” and thinks “blame New York: he still had the conviction that American art should be Big.” City on Fire is big: 927 pages, a dozen substantial characters, numerous plots and subplots, all five boroughs represented, seven books and facsimile “interludes,” 94 chapters. And it has had big buildup: movie sale before publication, huge advance, pre-pub comparisons of Hallberg to world-class heavyweights.

A novelist in City on Fire has the Tristram Shandy problem: in the novelist’s “head, the book kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it. But how was it possible for a book to be as big as life? Such a book would have to allocate 30-odd pages for each hour spent living.” Regarding scale, Hallberg has mentioned his fondness for 19^th-century triple-decker novels and for Bolano’s 2066. He has eloquently defended DeLillo’s Underworld against James Wood. So I expect readers, especially those residing in NYC, will wonder if City on Fire is really “Big” like Underworld or other American novels of New York such as Gaddis’s J R or McElroy’s Women and Men or even Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Or if Hallberg’s novel is, in the famous words of Ed Sullivan, who hosted a TV variety program during the period the novel covers, a “really big show.”

At the core of City on Fire is a traditional dynastic plot: elderly plutocrat Stuart Hamilton-Sweeney owns a skyscraper with his name on it in Midtown. After the death of his wife, the gold-digger Felicia Gould and her crooked brother Amory worm their way into the failing patriarch’s firm and his family. The patriarch’s son William is a gay, drug-using, one-time punk musician, a painter and photographer who hasn’t spoken to his father or sister for years. In the present William is involved with a naïve African-American would-be novelist named Mercer Goodman just up from small-town Georgia. The patriarch’s daughter Regan, who does public relations for the firm, is married to money manager Keith Lamplighter, with whom she has two children. The Hamilton-Sweeney children’s lives cross at a squat in the Lower East Side, where William’s former band lives and where Keith begins an affair with a college-age groupie named Samantha. Will the Hamilton-Sweeney heirs accept responsibility and save the company from the Goulds and from an insider trading charge? And then can the building and family be saved from a bomb manufactured by the band that has, under the new leadership of Nietzsche-quoting Nicky Chaos, morphed into a radical anarchist group?

As an appetizer for the slow-cooking succession story, Hallberg early on introduces an attempted murder mystery when someone shoots Samantha in Central Park. Her weeks in a coma allow Hallberg to bring in her father, a fireworks contractor; her high school boyfriend from Long Island, Charlie Weisebarger; various misfits from the music and drug underworld; investigative journalist Richard Groskoph; his neighbor, the young gallery assistant Jenny Nguyen; and a crippled old police Inspector named Larry Pulaski. Eventually, the dynastic and murder plots come together and reach a literal cliff- (or skyscraper-) hanging climax on July 13, 1977, the night of the famous blackout.

The number of elements that Hallberg eventually unites is impressive, but City on Fire is essentially a traditional, even a formulaic work with a very long and high Freitag’s triangle. Compare the novel with one that Hallberg says he admires, Coover’s The Public Burning, which ends with Uncle Sam’s electrocuting the Rosenbergs in Times Square, and you will see the conventionality of City on Fire. Coover’s novel was an anthropological carnivalesque work with documentary features. Hallberg’s book presents itself as a sociological “documentary” with a moviesque ending. The interludes include handwritten pages by Stuart Hamilton-Sweeney, two typed sections of the journalist’s “Fireworkers” manuscript, too many illustrated pages of Samantha’s zine, a long letter from the patriarch’s grandson, and some photographs. The 96 short chapters usually focus on one or two characters and are heavily expository and narrative. As the stories move forward, the novel also moves backward with lengthy flashbacks to the earlier lives of the characters. They are sufficiently realistic (maybe too realistic, too familiar and recognizable) to support the documentary illusion, and the 70’s mise en scene must have been heavily researched since Hallberg is only 39. But perhaps because his scale is so large, there is a paucity of dialogue and the drama it creates. In this regard, compare City on Fire with J R, which is almost all dialogue and trusts readers can follow complex relations without having their hands held by the author. J R seems more “documentary”—an oral history—than City on Fire, which is like an illustrated omniscient history. In his reviews and essays, Hallberg shows he knows modernist and postmodernist fiction, but in this novel’s plotting and character development, City on Fire could have been written by Dreiser had he lived long enough or Tom Wolfe had he damped down his style.

Hallberg’s “Note on Sources” mentions Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. I was very surprised to find him crediting these two works that influenced my study of Big American novels of the 1970s and 80’s entitled The Art of Excess. Surprised because the two works develop in great detail the importance of homology or analogy (form versus causality) as a means of creating conceptual systems and connecting disparate materials. Perhaps if I thought City on Fire mysterious enough to read again, I would find that Hallberg creates the kind of analogues that give, for example, Underworld, from its title onward, its original treatment of urban ecology, its inventive synecdoches and odd assemblages, crazed existential voices and potent abstractions. Hallberg knows DeLillo’s novel inside and out. But because Hallberg has chosen to commit himself to more accessible methods--old-fashioned character agency, plot causality, and documentary representation—City on Fire doesn’t provide a new and profound systemic understanding of the thick city that is its subject. Yes, Hallberg includes different meanings of fire—from fireworks in the sky to fire in the loins, from political arson to the fire of damnation—but for this kind of imagistic connectivity he didn’t need Hofstadter and Bateson—or DeLillo.

Given the number of pages Hallberg has written, it may be unfair to expect the kind of stylistic fire and variety we find in either McElroy’s Women and Men, which includes the voices of angels on high and of idiot savants on low city streets, or even the double-binding first-person banalities of Bob Slocum in Heller’s Something Happened. The sections of City on Fire that dip into the mind of Goodman the novelist are not so different stylistically from the sections about Regan the anxious mother or those that feature the teenage rebel Charlie. Different concerns, surely, but all expressed within a fairly narrow discursive range. McElroy and Heller, along with the other Big novelists of New York I’ve mentioned, felt, I believe, that the city as subject required some artistic deformation beyond mere supersizing—what I’ve called functional excess, formal and stylistic methods of defamiliarizing a place and people much depicted in every medium. Hallberg seems more interested in familiarizing his readers with the bad old days of New York City in the 1970s. Every year or two, the Times publishes a story about a person who has walked every street of Manhattan. In his prose, Hallberg is like that pedestrian until the final 120 pages when the blackout causes the pace to pick up and the style to rev up.

In 2011 I published an essay wondering why we didn’t have in the 21st century a New York novel that equaled those earlier works I’ve mentioned. The closest candidate was Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. Since then Pynchon has released Bleeding Edge, but it was a long, sappy entertainment, no Gravity’s Rainbow of the Big Apple. The last few years have seen some ambitious and excellent novels set in New York—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World—but none combine the comprehensive vision and artistic originality of the late 20^th century works. So I was hoping for big things from City on Fire. It is certainly large and seems to this recent arrival in the city widely informed, but it’s that third dimension—depth—that I didn’t find. The novel has an ambitious (if ineffectual novelist) and an experimental artist, but the character who most closely approximates the sensibility of the author is a journalist.

City on Fire has numerous literary allusions and metafictional pointers, a reference to the Great American Novel, several mentions of that Great American Poet Whitman. The walls of the artist William’s studio represent the fiction that describes them. The walls are “covered in signs, the kind you saw on subway platforms, or taped to the bulletproof glass of a bodega. Something was slightly off about them… A stop-sign was skewed, its angles foreshortened. An Uncle Sam recruiting poster was taller than she [Jenny] was and missing an eye.” Observing this trompe l’oeil work, the gallerist Jenny “couldn’t tell if it was good, exactly, but no one could say it wasn’t ambitious.” The paintings are reminders, not inventions, facsimiles like the novel’s interludes. Hallberg’s characters and events are factsimiles.[sic] Like that part-time New York City resident Jonathan Franzen in Freedom and Purity, Hallberg offers reams of data about familiar people within a slightly fractured but eventually closed form. Unlike Franzen, Hallberg has at least attempted the Great New York Novel—“no one could say it wasn’t ambitious”--but Hallberg has placed too much trust in the throw-weight of his subject and his pages, so the “great” is less qualitative than quantitative, as in the phrase “the greater New York area.” A devotee of Excess, I’ve never used the phrase “less is more.” But fewer characters and plots might have given City on Fire more of the metaphoric density of The Flamethrowers or the emotional intensity of Preparation for the Next Life or the meta-artistic insight of The Blazing World. Now, take those three medium-length novels and jam them together, and you’d have a new Big Book of New York.

Joshua Cohen

Book of Numbers

A latecomer to writing fiction, I’m always on the envious lookout for American prodigies, novelists whose first books come fulsomely formed in their youth, prodigious works such as William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Thomas Pynchon’s V., Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, three published before their authors were 30, all before 35. Joshua Cohen began more modestly with Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto in 2007 when he was 27, but now—at 35—Cohen has published two prodigious novels: Witz, an 817-page mock epic about the last Jew in the world, in 2010, and Book of Numbers, a 580-page novel about the founder of “Tetration,” an Internet search company that resembles Google and has its New York City office a block away from Google’s.

The earlier prodigies’ novels were stuffed with specialized, often technical knowledge, were non-linear in form, and disparate in styles, more like strange systems of information than traditional narratives. The books asked readers to perform searches: comb through heterogeneous materials, find connections between historical or scientific information and personal experience, and develop a meta awareness of how systems are constructed. The most recent of the earlier five, House of Leaves (2000), is the most directly influenced by information processing: Danielewski’s inclusion of visual materials and an index make the book a print simulacrum of a searchable hypertext. Book of Numbers is the next generation of the systems novel, for Cohen combines prodigious knowledge and formal disruption to explicitly treat math prodigies who developed the hardware and software to manage massive information--and then surveil the wetware of private lives.

Joshua Cohen, the 40-year-old founder of Tetration and fourteenth richest man in the world, hires a failed almost-40 novelist named Joshua Cohen to ghostwrite the founder’s autobiography. Prevented from finishing that book, the character Joshua Cohen assembles the text the real author Joshua Cohen publishes as Book of Numbers, a combination biography of the founder and autobiography of the ghost. “Assembles” because the novel is a hard-drive collection of documents: interview transcripts, formulas, programming code, blog posts by the ghost’s estranged wife, emails by her current lover and the ghost’s agent, questionable first-person recollections by the ghost, photos of archaic female forms, fabricated epigraphs, texts that have been crossed through, and one crucial footnote that may deconstruct the whole kludged assemblage.

On the novel’s first page, the ghost says, “there’s nothing worse than description….No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is.” Not a very welcoming or promising way to start a book. But the ghost soon elicits sympathy: because his novel about the Holocaust was published on 9/11/2001, it flopped. Since then he has been writing book reviews (like author Cohen, a staff reviewer at Harper’s) and doing anonymous hack work--travel pieces, restaurant reviews, and corporate speeches--while his wife supported him. In the novel’s present of 2011, she is seeing another man and is writing a blog revealing the ghost’s many flaws.

Back in 2004, Cohen the New York freelancer got a break from a “Cohencidence” [Witz] when asked to interview the celebrity who shares his name, but the piece was killed because it wasn’t puffery. Now the founder remembers that interview (which resembles one that author Cohen did with Slavoj Zizek) and offers to pay a huge amount of money to ghost Cohen to write a quick and dirty tell-all autobiography. He says “readable books” must have their research “wrapped like mummies, in the purest and softest verbiage, which both preserves them and makes them presentable.” Author Cohen uses about a hundred pages of soft verbiage to establish human interest in his narrator, but I found these pages in Part 1 familiar stuff from—or parody of--too numerous “confessional” novels by frustrated New York City writers.

Harder and much more interesting verbiage begins in Part 2 (which is entitled “0”). The setting moves from New York and Palo Alto to Dubai and Abu Dhabi where the two Cohens stay in luxury hotels and the founder, whom the ghost calls “Principal,” narrates his life. His father Abraham helped create the personal computer; Principal was a math prodigy who went to Stanford in 1989 but didn’t attend classes; Principal and two computer science whizzes created a marginally profitable list of websites, and then went on to invent the algorithm for Tetration (which refers, like googolplex, to almost impossibly large numbers and, in this novel about Jewish protagonists, may allude to the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters transliterated as Yahweh). Tetration needed venture capital, and then an executive—Kori Dienerowitz—to manage the three prodigies, who were joined by a slightly older “computing genius” from India—Muwekma Ohlone or “Moe”—who added to the search algorithm “reversibility,” the ability to store information about the searcher, which led eventually to “adverks” and later on to government surveillance of and then entrapment of Tetration users. Dying of cancer, Principal has become an ascetic Buddhist with eccentricities, he realizes, like those of Howard Hughes, but Principal wants to publish his autobiography to cleanse his soul, to punish those inside the company who betrayed his vision, and to expose NSA-type snooping with which Tetration cooperated.

Cohen’s amalgam of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the less publicly known founders of Google seems informed and authentic, perhaps because the author gives Principal an authoritative and sometimes authoritarian voice. He uses the royal or CEO “we” when talking about himself, has little use for transitions or the ghost’s questions, has a prodigious memory, and spools out speech thick with scientific terminology and what the ghost calls “techsperanto,” neologisms such as “rectard,” “quadlingual” and “comptrasted.” Principal has conflicts with his colleagues, but the arguments are about ideas and rarely personal, for, unlike his ghost whose life is full of personal problems, Principal back then had little time for or interest in the quotidian. Occasionally impenetrable, Principal’s discourse is a remarkable tour de force for a literary novelist.

Part 3 (entitled “1” again to highlight the ones and zeroes of code) returns to the softer verbiage of the ghost now separated from Principal, impoverished in Germany, forbidden online access to protect secrecy, and trying to work on the contracted book, but there are distractions and complications. He searches in Vienna for a young Omani woman whom he rescued from spousal abuse in Dubai. He reports a threat from a Julian Assange figure—Thor Ang Balk of “b-Leaks”—or maybe from his rogue assistant Anders Maleksen, who wants to leak the information the ghost has before he can publish it in a book. The ghost’s agent dies of a heart attack, endangering payment for the book, and the ghost’s estranged wife comes back into the picture via her blog with a story about a betrayal he had not admitted earlier. The ghost, along with the reader, wonders what happened to Principal. These multiple plot points seem to be the author’s reward for those literary readers who may have struggled through Principal’s math-heavy history of Tetration. Or these plot developments could have been invented—the relation with the married Omani is particularly implausible—by the ghostwriter to make his combination biography and autobiography salable to a publisher if the ghosted book is anticipated by leaks. In a work about contemporaries’ unwillingness or inability to keep secrets, narrator Cohen may have “secretly” composed a fiction within author Cohen’s novel.

The final words of Witz are that being a Cohen “is steady work.” Book of Numbers employs three and links them by betrayal. The ghost’s purely motivated Holocaust novel is betrayed by circumstances. The ghost cheats on his wife, and she cheats on him. The founder allows his pure mathematics to be betrayed for profit and for governmental cooperation, and he is betrayed by his colleagues and, perhaps, his ghost. Author Cohen creates initial expectations of accessibility that are betrayed in part 2 and then restored in part 3. Then there’s the biblical Joshua. In the Old Testament Book of Numbers, Yahweh feels betrayed by the Israelites He has delivered from Egypt, continually punishes them in the wilderness, and denies entry to the promised land to Moses, the founder of the code. The spies who came back from the promised land with a positive report, Joshua and Caleb (the name given to a journalist turned fiction writer in the novel), are honored by Yahweh, and Joshua leads the Israelites into Canaan. Author Joshua Cohen reverses the Biblical Joshua for Cohen is the spy in Silicon Valley who shows it’s not all milk and honey. In a decade or so, another Joshua may emerge from a library to claim there’s an encrypted relation between Book of Numbers and the Kabbalah, where gematria turns letters into numbers, and Cohen’s novel will be “betrayed” by its interpreter. Or perhaps not.

Prodigies can be abrasive. Ghost Cohen’s and author Cohen’s first words are, “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off.” Danielewski’s opening sentence in House of Leaves is “This is not for you.” Although Book of Numbers challenges readers who prefer what DeLillo has called “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard fiction,” this novel is for you if you love, as I do, moral complexities that an author scales up and out from personal life to the systemic, from individual identity and marital issues to politics, history, and religion—and then loops back down again to show the effects of encompassing systems on the personal. The following passage from one of Principal’s transcribed interviews illustrates his limited moral concerns, as well as his quirky style. Cohen the interviewer has asked Principal about Tetration’s “censorship of nonillegal sites”. Principal replies:

If we experienced guilt it was not from violating any ethics or morals but the magnitude of the second eigenvalue. Tetrate it. Do not. Deploying emotions without matrices distressed us. Human intervention was the crime. Lack of system was the crime. This is all about our eternal failure to have deved a viable semantic algy that translates, interprets, and reads between the lines to appreciate intent.”

“Eigenvalue” has to do with the number of variables. “Deved” and “algy” are short for “developed” and “algorithm.” “Tetrate” means “search.” Only later does Principal admit that it’s not the intent of a site’s creator that matters but the intent of Big Government’s search of the sites that the Big Data of Tetration can identify. Principal failed to develop the algy that “reads between the lines,” but author Cohen employs an archaic information system—the novel—that trains readers to do just that and to make subtle moral judgments about loyalty and betrayal, purity and profit, judgments that require thinking beyond the childish law of Google--“Don’t be evil.”

In Cohen’s previous book, Four New Messages, several of which are about the Internet, he has a New York novelist say that in an earlier time people “`wrote excessive books about excess that were never excessively read.’” These writers include some of “my” prodigies. Readers who resist or even resent prodigious novels may find Book of Numbers excessive, prodigal in its details about an artist’s failure and a mathematician’s success; in its digressions on mummies, mommies, and other subjects; in its geek wordplay and comic set pieces that include gibbering celebrities at a cocktail party in Palo Alto, pranks perpetrated by start-up boy geniuses, and an absurd political argument with a prince in Dubai. But behind the extravagances here, as in the even more manically prodigious and stylistically hyperwrought Witz, there is a caustic earnestness that pushes Cohen to exceed literary conventions of proportion and propriety to represent what he sees as an excess of access.

In the culture and in the novel, personal information is willingly made public through social media or memoirs to shame or promote or profit, and private information can be accessed by corporations and governments for gain and power. Here is Principal speaking, it appears, for the author:

We want to see and be watched, to listen and be heard, and even a cave needs to be famous if only among caves, or to the fighters it hides, to the fighters who storm it, if only to itself. Our appetite for secrets is our appetite for fame. How many we keep is how much we lack. Then we divulge around the fire. Then we only have others to live for.

Autobiographer Cohen and his over-divulging email correspondents represent the first excess of access, Principal enables the second, and novelist Cohen throws all their voices in what might be called sacrificial realism, the artist giving up accessible artfulness to imitate contemporary ugliness, the Age of Glut and Gluttony co-terminus with the Digital Age.

An early meaning of “prodigy” was “omen” or “warning.” Cohen’s is similar to that of the real Julian Assange in an essay entitled “Google Is Not What It Seems.” I worry that Book of Numbers may be dismissed as a tardy expose of overreaching corporate power, but Cohen’s achievement—and it is substantial as well as inventive--lies in his now ancient (in tech terms) history of Internet search, his presentation of local moral compromises in Silicon Valley that, like the butterfly wings of the chaos theory discussed in the novel, caused global illegal consequences. The book-producing character Cohen accuses the screen-displaying Cohen of ruining the codex book, but I believe author Cohen finds in the computer and the Internet models, as well as a subjects, for the density, range, and scope of his novel. Perhaps the greatest contemporary prodigy, Thomas Pynchon, said in Gravity’s Rainbow “Everything is connected.” But when he wrote his Internet novel, Bleeding Edge, it turned out to be a Mr. Softee entertainment. Book of Numbers is the hard-edged next stage forward. Like Joshua Cohen the mathematician, Joshua Cohen the novelist wants to “engineer the ultimate. The connection of connections.”

—end—