Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?

Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box set masquerading as a novel. As such it will be great. A New York setting, a cast that’s a Noah’s Ark migrant mix (from Afro to Vietnamese), a gripping crime investigation and a historical and dramatic time-frame running from the New Year’s celebrations for the American bicentennial in 1976 to the nightmare of the 1977 New York blackout.

A box set is a distinct possibility. Hallberg has already sold the film rights. The plot’s got everything: poverty versuswealth, power and corruption, racial tension, drugs, punk anarchy, sex and, above all, connections between a great range of characters (some share the same shrink) as if the novel had spawned a whole fictional family. One sleepless night I counted to 33 and hypnagogically shifted Middlemarch to New York.