FAMILY PORTRAIT

In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.

- THOMAS MALLON

In the tale of an alienated father and daughter, characters stare deeply into themselves.

The Great American Novel is a long-dead cultural aspiration, extinguished by a healthy realization that the country is too big and too varied to generate any singular, definitive volume. American novelists tend, in our time, to earn public recognition of greatness in a steady, incremental (one is almost tempted to say un-American) way: through the long-term production of many books that arrive with a certain regularity and are roughly on the same scale, one to the next. For writers as different as Alice McDermott, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers, the greatness classification comes more from accrual than from explosion.

Even so, some younger novelists with exceptional gifts seem to have a romantically persistent notion of the singlebook catapult. Now in his mid-forties, but still boyishly author-photo’d, Garth Risk Hallberg continues to wobble with promise and perplexity. His novels, so far only three in number, sometimes murmur and sometimes roar, operating by wisps of inference or by maximalist elaboration. He has flirted with a kind of cosmic connectedness, or at least a large sociopolitical canvas, before subsiding—as he has done with his new book, “The Second Coming” (Knopf )—back into the super-circumscribed and familial. Looking at the three books together, a reader perceives not so much a multifarious œuvre as a series of make-or-break shots.