Negotiating the Sins of the Father in "The Second Coming"

Greg Zimmerman

May 30

At some point, we book-loving people will have to stop with the David Foster Wallace comparisons for any white male writer who toes the line between aggravating his reader with verbosity and writing long beautiful sentences imbued with the genius of their creator. But today is not that day. Nine years after his second novel, City on Fire, made an asteroid-sized splash in publishing, Garth "the next DFW" Risk Hallberg (even the three-name thing, too!) is back with his third effort, The Second Coming.

But let's back up and address that 600-pound gorilla in the room. Back in 2015, City on Fire created a heckuva publishing hullabaloo when it was reported that Hallberg received a $2 million advance. Dozens of think pieces sprouted up all over the internet wondering why publishing was crowning yet another unproven white male novelist. The pushback almost overshadowed the question of whether the nearly thousand-page novel (hence the initial spate of DFW comparisons) itself was actually any good! I remember a colleague at the bookstore where I work taking one look at the thick galley and sneering, "Sheesh, how pompous," as if merely publishing 1,000 pages was itself an act of vainglory.

Perhaps only Hallberg and his publisher know if the novel earned out that hefty advance, but City of Fire did wind up on many 2015 year-end "best of" lists, including The Washington Post's and NPR's. An adaptation of the novel even recently made it to the small screen for a limited series on Apple TV+.

That's all just semi-important background for a discussion of Hallberg's The Second Coming. The novel's title is a reference to a legendary Prince bootleg, as well as key plot points. So it's a good start – I dig a multi-entendre title doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The story is this: It's 2011, New York City, and 13-year-old Jolie drops her phone onto the subway tracks. Fearing the ire of her mother, she climbs down to rescue it, and then must be rescued herself before being splattered by an oncoming train. This lands Jolie in a pysch ward – whether because an overzealous doctor is just being safe or because she is truly suicidal, we aren't sure. This becomes one of the central questions of the novel.

The incident also brings her ne'er-do-well father, Ethan, back into the picture. After Ethan and Jolie's mother had divorced a few years prior due to Ethan's substance abuse, Ethan had absconded to California where he became the groundskeeper for a famous actor's secret substance abuse rehabilitation center. Ethan's return – his second coming, per se – sets in motion a (slow-moving) chain of events that will either destroy or save both Jolie and Ethan.

At a comparatively scaled-back 600 pages, The Second Coming dives deeply into Jolie and Ethan's fraught relationship. It's a story about addiction and mental health, about second (and third and fourth) chances. And it's about how, maybe, when you're of a certain race and socioeconomic background, you're often afforded more leeway. I'd love to think that throughline about white male privilege in this novel is a wink at the circus surrounding the publication of City on Fire. But it's hard to say.

The novel is structured as a sort of conversation between two alternating narrations – a memoir written by the daughter, Jolie, 10 years after the events of the novel, and a letter to Jolie, written by her father, Ethan, which Jolie considers as she writes her memoir. This structure is both a creative way to add background (Ethan's letter to Jolie explains how he met her mother and then, tragically, fell into substance abuse) and also a way for Ethan and Jolie to subtly have a back and forth, almost a de facto conversation, on the page.

But then we start to get a little tired. The Second Coming feels every bit as long as its 600 pages. Don't get me wrong, I love a good doorstop – as a matter of fact, I was a huge fan of City on Fire. When long novels work, they're rife with digression or tangents or set pieces that, while supporting the central narrative, also serve to add color or authorial flare. They're fun to read on their own. In The Second Coming, though, we nearly drown in detail, not digression, which just makes the narrative feel burdensome. Hallberg often spends a page where a sentence would do. Jolie and Ethan's relationship is interesting, but it's not a sturdy enough bucket to carry the weight of all the words surrounding it.

Then, the last straw: A structure shift in the third act of the novel really slows things down further when we feel like we should be hurdling quickly toward a conclusion. For nearly 100 pages, Hallberg switches the narrative to a bunch of shorter sections alternating between advancing what's happening in the present and providing background for various supporting characters. Why, near the end of a 600-page journey, are we still bogged down with minor character backstory? This is it, I thought: My reader aggravation has won out over my enjoyment of the work.

David Foster Wallace frequently talked about that fine line. So I'll leave you with this: If you're a fan of David Foster Wallace's minor works, like The Pale King or Girl With Curious Hair – that is, his books that even he would've admitted tilt over that aggravation line – you may also enjoy The Second Coming. But if books like that are a chore for you to read, The Second Coming may follow suit.