Publishers Weekly
03/25/2024
Hallberg’s meandering latest (after City on Fire) traces the tentative reunion between an estranged father and his teenage daughter. It’s 2011 and Ethan Aspern, a recovering heroin addict who’s been in and out of prison for a series of small-time drug busts, has endured a lifetime of depression. His 13-year-old daughter, Jolie, lives with her mother, Sarah, in Upper Manhattan. When Ethan learns Jolie was nearly hit by a subway train after trying to recover her dropped phone from the tracks, he senses she’s having problems of her own and vows to help set her straight. Long flashbacks elaborate on Ethan’s uneven history with Sarah, his descent into addiction, and his winding path toward recovery, hobbled in part by an ingrained sense that he’s not worth saving (“Talk of changed lives had the same effect on Ethan as the shibboleths of AA... which was a kind of gag reflex of solitude, like he was the last person on earth shut out of these simple doctrines of subjection and oneness and love”). A climactic Thanksgiving scene poses the question: might a repentant father and his rebellious daughter save each other? The novel is awash with gritty details and gutting emotional insights, but there’s an overabundance of purple prose and the drawn-out payoff is only semirewarding. This doesn’t quite scale the heights of Hallberg’s breakout. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (May)
From the Publisher
At its core, this is a tale of the love that makes a family and how it does so.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Reading Garth Risk Hallberg is a constant delightful surprise—you never know what’s coming next: a gorgeous turn of phrase, a perfect pop culture reference, a brilliant new observation, a jaw-dropping plot twist. And all of these gifts are on full display in The Second Coming, a story about a father bound up by his mistakes, a daughter bound up in her silence, and a family in need of saving. It’s a beautiful and daring novel, as inventive as it is breathtaking.” —Nathan Hill, author of Wellness
“A portrait of a daughter in crisis and a father in need of redemption, Garth Risk Hallberg’s The Second Coming is a powerful statement about the clarifying sense of purpose to be found in parental love, and how we demand more of ourselves for the sake of our children. Hallberg’s Ethan is a fascinating study in whether a certain kind of arrested American male, consumed early on by purposelessness and addiction, can in fact have a second act, even if his first is still, somehow, belatedly, being written, and not entirely by him.” —Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves
“Garth Risk Hallberg’s The Second Coming is a sprawling, aching, ultimately hopeful account of a father’s love for a daughter and a daughter’s defiance of that love when all too often it manifests as dysfunction. Hallberg deals with the dilemma of parental inheritance with a light touch, and the grace that finally descends on the Aspern clan is not only transformative but triumphant.” —Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
“Garth Risk Hallberg’s great gift is his ability to translate epic themes into intensely intimate, cumulatively powerful novels. Full of tension and emotion and populated by vivid characters and ideas, The Second Coming builds word by word to capture the intricacies of life while revealing its own breathtaking scope. This is a world you can fully enter and explore—one that resembles our own while expanding our understanding of who we are.” —Christina Baker Kline, author of #1 New York Times best seller Orphan Train
Kirkus Reviews
2024-02-17
A father and daughter share an epic bond over anxiety and addiction.
Hallberg’s 2015 breakthrough, City on Fire, exemplified Tom Wolfe’s concept of the billion-footed beast, a social novel that strived to capture the world in its fullness. This disappointing follow-up is similarly bulky and rangy (and very New York) but narrows its focus to two lead characters. In 2011, when most of the novel is set, Ethan Aspern is a recovering addict who’s determined to bond with his hyperintelligent 13-year-old daughter, Jolie. But she has her own set of emotional issues, including some ill-advised drinking that leads to a near-miss with a subway train when she hops on the tracks to recover her phone. The novel shifts back and forth in time, chronicling Ethan’s unlikely romance with Sarah Kupferberg, Jolie’s mother (he’s listless, she’s an aspiring academic); his fraught relationship with his father, head of a foundering private school; Jolie’s budding, sketchy friendship with a young man equally interested in Occupy Wall Street and LSD; and Sarah’s parents, judgmental of everybody involved. The core of the novel occurs during a (metaphorically fraught) Thanksgiving weekend, as Ethan attempts to bond with a Jolie who’s determined to give everyone the silent treatment; what ensues includes (among other things) accusations of kidnapping, a bad LSD trip, and anaphylactic shock. Hallberg enlivens this setup by playing with form, modeling sections after an old-school mixtape and shuffling perspectives, but his efforts to show how the parent-child bond both persists and disrupts feels stodgy. Fans of Jonathan Franzen will appreciate Hallberg’s hyperprecise, socially acute observational skill; readers of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels will note a similarly desperate, self-deprecating dad in Ethan. But the resulting novel is too overworked to feel as lively and funny as either of those authors.
Whip-smart and ambitious, but tangled in its own web of themes and scenarios.
