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A City on a Hill
Hard Cover; Very Good; Dust Jacket - Very Good; Alfred A. Knopf First Edition / First Printing. Hardcover, Very Good cloth covered boards with light edge wear and fading. Textblock is tight and clean. DJ is Very Good with light edge wear and sunned spine. Page top edges dyed grey.
- GenresFiction
256 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1975
35 people want to read
About the author
George V. Higgins
76 books263 followersGeorge Vincent Higgins was a United States author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, and college professor. He is best known for his bestselling crime novels.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 9, 2025
Though I've not read the whole Higgins oeuvre, from what I have read, I feel confident in saying that A City on a Hill represents the purest distillation of his style. Many negative reviews of this book complain that "nothing happens," as what we get amounts to a bunch of people talking about fashioning a political candidate without actually doing it, but to me that's precisely why the story the novel tells perfectly aligns with Higgins' "let the characters rather than narration tell the story" ethos. This novel is a matroyshka doll of dialogue, with a single conversation containing within it several other mini-conversations. These DC politicos, slightly transmogrified iterations of the typical Boston criminals and lawyers that were Higgins' stock and trade, know their way around a good zinger: "He's very, very conservative, which I guess happens to you if you spend twenty years of your life running the electrical company." All of the banter and bicker in the end amounts to naught politically, with one character ultimately asking: "Has it occurred to you recently, Sam, [...] that the net effect of what we're doing is stroking a guy's ego, and that's all?" Sounds pretty prescient to me. I get why affectively reading a book structured like A City on a Hill won't appeal to as many as something more in the page-ripping political thriller mold, but for those who love to savor good dialogue, A City on a Hill epitomizes what can be done with the novel-in-dialogue format.
April 13, 2024
Those hoping for the flash and genius of THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE will be significantly disappointed by this inexplicable misfire. Higgins has more of a gift for criminal intrigue than political intrigue. And the sharp dialogue of COYLE has been replaced with a surprisingly pedestrian and often interminable quality. It doesn't help that Higgins tells this story, such as it is, MOSTLY through dialogue. But there are no real insights about political power and who controls the spin here. It's just a bunch of sad men rambling who don't have all that much to say.
April 21, 2020
Excellent Higgins novel. If you’re a fan of his you should read this. If you’ve never read Higgins I would not advise you start here. But it is still a great book. 90% dialogue as we have come to expect from Higgins.
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March 13, 2025Zero stars....I cannot believe this is the same person who wrote "The Friends Of Eddie Coyle". Clumsy, self-indulgent dialogue, boring characters, I only lasted sixty pages. Absolute drivel.
March 19, 2015
I came across an interview of George V. Higgins some time ago and I read that he kind of disowned this novel, his fourth, which came after a genre-changing trio of books set in the criminal underworld. Those novels, like all of his books, were driven by dialogue, but the interviewer made it seem like this one had ventured too far.
In a way, I take his point. 99 percent of this book is spoken, and most of the exposition Higgins does offer is simply 'he said,' 'she said.' The conversations are digressive, loopy, even proto-Seinfeldian in how the characters dwell on mundane things that would seem to have no point.
And what is the point here? The entire plot of the book consists of a senatorial aide, Hank Cavanaugh, gauging interest, at his boss's request, of another senator's potential presidential bid years in advance (the book takes place a few months before the Congressional impeachment hearings on Watergate). The real point, though, is seeing back-room politics from the aide's perspective. Cavanuagh, by the end, is kind of a tragic figure: 33 years old and already chewed up by the system.
The characters talk the way most of us talk to people we've known for a long time, elliptically and in shorthand, and Higgins expects you to be able to tease out what's important rather than relying on exposition to do it for you. 250 pages of this can get a bit much, sometimes, and all the characters do employ a similar style of speaking, but fortunately Higgins drops enough humor in to keep you from drowning.
Here's a sample:
"It's just that [the Senator]'s a dedicated man, and they're nice to have around if they're dedicated to doing the kind of things that not only ought to get done, but are feasible. Sam's fifty percent short on that scale. He's dedicated to doing things that ought to get done, and that's all. He's got this tendency, like a lot of them that if he thinks it ought to get done, he can do it, and they get their heads down and try to do it. And there just isn't any way in the world you can persuade them that it doesn't make any difference how dedicated they are; it just can't be done.
He knows his ideals're much higher'n somebody else's, and he's resigned to it -- that people're not always going to be good, the way he wants them to be. So he can slug away at something that doesn't even compress when you hit it, and bark all the skin off his knuckles, and when he's too tired, he gives up. And he goes home. And he broods. And the next morning he comes back in, and he's got another idea, just as wild and innocent and marvelous as the one he just gave up on, and you're off to the races again...he thinks he can do it again, an infinite number of times. He thinks he can do it on rail transportation, natural gas, soybeans, and urban sprawl, and so he tries, on all of those things, and that means I'm tearing around all the time, always asking for something, never giving anything away because Sam's got principles, using up my life on things that haven't got a tinker's damned prayer of making it.
Sam can take it. I can't. I'm just a kid from the woods that got lucky. Now I've got to get smart."
Just listen to how that sounds. A City on a Hill, when compared to its predecessors, does seem like a misstep, but it's a noble misstep, a vastly entertaining misstep.
**Here's the interview I was reading in which Higgins says he would want this novel back: http://sites.google.com/site/fivepubs...
In a way, I take his point. 99 percent of this book is spoken, and most of the exposition Higgins does offer is simply 'he said,' 'she said.' The conversations are digressive, loopy, even proto-Seinfeldian in how the characters dwell on mundane things that would seem to have no point.
And what is the point here? The entire plot of the book consists of a senatorial aide, Hank Cavanaugh, gauging interest, at his boss's request, of another senator's potential presidential bid years in advance (the book takes place a few months before the Congressional impeachment hearings on Watergate). The real point, though, is seeing back-room politics from the aide's perspective. Cavanuagh, by the end, is kind of a tragic figure: 33 years old and already chewed up by the system.
The characters talk the way most of us talk to people we've known for a long time, elliptically and in shorthand, and Higgins expects you to be able to tease out what's important rather than relying on exposition to do it for you. 250 pages of this can get a bit much, sometimes, and all the characters do employ a similar style of speaking, but fortunately Higgins drops enough humor in to keep you from drowning.
Here's a sample:
"It's just that [the Senator]'s a dedicated man, and they're nice to have around if they're dedicated to doing the kind of things that not only ought to get done, but are feasible. Sam's fifty percent short on that scale. He's dedicated to doing things that ought to get done, and that's all. He's got this tendency, like a lot of them that if he thinks it ought to get done, he can do it, and they get their heads down and try to do it. And there just isn't any way in the world you can persuade them that it doesn't make any difference how dedicated they are; it just can't be done.
He knows his ideals're much higher'n somebody else's, and he's resigned to it -- that people're not always going to be good, the way he wants them to be. So he can slug away at something that doesn't even compress when you hit it, and bark all the skin off his knuckles, and when he's too tired, he gives up. And he goes home. And he broods. And the next morning he comes back in, and he's got another idea, just as wild and innocent and marvelous as the one he just gave up on, and you're off to the races again...he thinks he can do it again, an infinite number of times. He thinks he can do it on rail transportation, natural gas, soybeans, and urban sprawl, and so he tries, on all of those things, and that means I'm tearing around all the time, always asking for something, never giving anything away because Sam's got principles, using up my life on things that haven't got a tinker's damned prayer of making it.
Sam can take it. I can't. I'm just a kid from the woods that got lucky. Now I've got to get smart."
Just listen to how that sounds. A City on a Hill, when compared to its predecessors, does seem like a misstep, but it's a noble misstep, a vastly entertaining misstep.
**Here's the interview I was reading in which Higgins says he would want this novel back: http://sites.google.com/site/fivepubs...
February 8, 2012
I thought for some reason this would be a political thriller but it's more of a political anti-thriller. More interesting to think about after the fact than to actually read.
September 16, 2013
Predominantly dialogue. Predominantly set in Washington, D.C. Dated politics.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews