All life is suffering. Well, duh, Jolie would remember thinking, the one time Roshi Steve ever stooped to bullet-point the noble truths of Buddhism. Her phone, secure in its cubby, was more or less a snuff film of the world’s entangled miseries: bread lines, forever wars, the beehives gone silent, the coral reefs bleached white. Yet there at the zendo to which she’d been sneaking off each Thursday the spring of her seventh-grade year, wisdom wasn’t supposed to come in such pithy little nuggets. So it was only later, toward the end of April, that she would realize this First Noble Truth had been the through-line all along.
My wife noped out after reading that opening paragraph of The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg. We were choosing our next book for our two-person book club, alternating fiction and nonfiction, trying to find something we’ll both like. She reads a lot of literary fiction. I rarely do. We had three options from her backlog: A Little Life, All the Colors of the Dark, or The Second Coming. She steered us toward All the Colors of the Dark, which I thought was terrific.
But The Second Coming? Too experimental.
Maybe it was that opening. Maybe it was the switches between a universal narrator and first person: “But in the story I now find myself again at the outer limits of my ability to tell.” Maybe it was the way Hallberg mixes very detailed, chatty interior experience with sudden philosophical statements, like “we don’t make our choices, so much as we are made by them.” Something about it wasn’t for her.
But I read it anyway. That opening paragraph grabbed me. It does something remarkable. It starts with Buddhist doctrine, pivots to a thirteen-year-old’s internal dismissal (“Well, duh”), then spirals through her phone full of world miseries, her sneaking off to a meditation class, all while foreshadowing something coming in April. You’re inside Jolie’s head and outside it at the same time.
By the end of the chapter, she’s a little drunk, standing in front of a subway train, having jumped down in front of it at a busy New York subway stop, using Buddhist thought to contemplate suicide:
But of course some verbs need no object, can simply exist on their own. Her whole pointless life had been a failure to realize, she realized. Yet all she had to do to change that was to stay here with the calm, to close her eyes and still the grasshopper mind, and see her research through to what now seemed its logical conclusion: that even a nothing was preferable to this something.
She’s framing her suicide attempt in the language of Buddhism, realizing, stilling the mind, reaching a conclusion. The structure is a circle. The opening’s philosophical abstraction becomes the closing’s crisis. And that attempt becomes the insighting incident of the story, but its language that got me.
Every character gets their interior experience rendered with this kind of obsessive precision. Someone called the book “maximal,” and that fits.
It reminded me of David Foster Wallace, mixing concrete sensory detail with philosophical weight, but staying more everyday and readable even when it’s doing something complex.
As the story unfolds, it’s really about a daughter and father going on an adventure together, both carrying their demons, not even talking to each other through most of it, everything recounted through their interior experience. It culminates with them literally on the lam, both taking LSD together, spending the night hiding in Ocean City, New Jersey.
The writing, if Goodreads is to be believed, many people find it tiring or offensive or show-offy. But he captures the experience of internal dialogue. While the book remains in third person, it’s shared in a way that mixes details of the experience with thoughts and fragments, in a structure that ChatGPT tells me is the clever combination of polysyndeton (the deliberate and repeated use of conjunctions) and cumulative sentences (the repeated adding of subordinate clauses to elaborate and expand on the core concept).
For me, it has an effect where a grammatically correct paragraph reads like the run-on sentence internal thoughts of a person in crisis. Give this paragraph a try:
They’ll be facing west up here, of course, the wrong way for sunrise, but it turns out not to matter. Or rather, on acid (as they must still to some extent be), anything can turn out to matter. To wit: he’s sitting with his nearly-grown little girl, as close as he’ll probably ever get to her again, atop what in some sense is the dead dark body of his own father, still trying to figure some way to go through with what he’s now realized he must do. And though the turf has now slightly re-dampened his jeans, it is everywhere else tipped in a frost he’s pretty sure he’s not imagining. And beyond, below, lies the outer dark of the dying little town, which, no matter how he’d cursed it, he’d never really believed he could wash off his hands. And while you do not get the whole lightshow looking west, a flaming eye or spreading curve to mirror that of the sun’s going under, there is this whole interesting range of washes the sky passes through, echoed in the whiskery deadness of grass with its touch of gray. And even if you can’t impute the existence of the sun from its effects, you still wouldn’t want to totally write it off, either. Unclear what they’re waiting for up here, but with him dumbfounded by the corner he’ll now have to paint himself into and her with not much to say beyond goodbye, it is rather like watching someone try to illustrate the concept of change.
This nested accumulation of details for even the simplest thing can be quite powerful when you’re attentive and tiring when you’re …. well tired. For me, it means the book is best read during a sunny day, coffee in hand, not in my usual reading time before bed as I try to quiet my mind. But I loved it.
Here’s one short chapter that recounts Ethan trying to salvage the relationship with his daughter by taking her to Ikea to setup a room for her at his apartment:
His response, this time around, was to let Jolie fill the cart with the sundry fripperies about which he’d been so disciplined above. Her room, the sleeping nook, would become her room again.
He didn’t want to think about whether the sum of cash in his pocket was sufficient to cover these lampshades and fuzzy throw pillows, but perhaps it was like riding a wave, you just didn’t look back, didn’t look down…
It was only in the too-long line that he had time to slow himself and reflect on the other problem: this was just way too much stuff to haul back on the water-taxi or in the yellow cab it would also leave no money to pay for. At some point, he was going to have to tell her what he’d realized—that something was going to have to be sacrificed for something else, or all would be lost. But just look at her, his little girl full of hope: he couldn’t, not now. So he held off, and held off, and inched forward in the line, and for as long as he could, and did, he was the greatest fucking dad in the world.
That ending line… He’s recounting the excitement of shopping with his daughter, setting up her room, trying to be present for her, but he doesn’t have the money. He can’t bring himself to tell her. And in that moment of holding off, of pretending everything will work out, he feels like “the greatest fucking dad in the world.” It captures the whole tension of the book, him wanting to be a good parent while sort of being a fuck up, but trying.
there’s this thing they say in the program, you know, about, like, connection being the opposite of addiction.
But notice what else… right in the middle of shopping for lampshades and fuzzy throw pillows, he drops this line: “that something was going to have to be sacrificed for something else, or all would be lost.” It’s profound and philosophical, but it’s embedded in the reality of standing in a checkout line with too much stuff and not enough money.
Or in that paragraph above, where he describes “the dying little town, which, no matter how he’d cursed it, he’d never really believed he could wash off his hands”. A profound statement about Ethan’s inability to escape his small-town upbringing, buried in details about frost and grass. Or the opening paragraph’s “All life is suffering.” This is what Hallberg does throughout the book, he layers these universal truths into the everyday texture of life.
You can protect your child only so much before you start to do damage. Beyond that you have to set them free.
I’m so curious about how Hallberg performs his craft. How does he do this layering of memory and foreshadowing and philosophical meaning, all chunk by chunk, so that a split second inside a Buddhist temple or a fragment of a moment on a hill ( not watching a sunrise ) can contain all these details and truths?
Yeah, people find it exhausting. The book didn’t grab the world’s attention the way his first novel, City on Fire, did. I struggled with the 600 pages at times. But oh my god, it’s something special.
I’m looking forward to reading City on Fire soon.