Garth Risk Hallberg Takes On the Life-and-Times Novel

Hallberg’s first novel, “A Field Guide to the North American Family” (2007), was a sort of multimedia art project that originated on a Web site and got published first by a small press. On the verso pages, mini-narratives from various points of view melded into the shared story of two Long Island families, the Harrisons and the Hungates. The recto pages contained pictures, sometimes inscrutable (an X-ray of hands, a Saran-wrapped hunting trophy), taken by myriad photographers. Definitional captions, occasionally just clever, but often truly witty, offered a taxonomy for any extraterrestrial having a first encounter with the human species: “Rumor, a resilient parasite, feeds on the Secret until its host is destroyed. In agricultural areas, Discretion is sometimes employed as a check on the Rumor population.”