The Brooklyn Rail

Ross Barkan, still in his mid-thirties, has already amassed an impressive bibliography⎯and I’m not just talking about the work that’s easy to find. His journalism, commentary, and criticism turn up in major venues like the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and The Nation, and twice he’s picked up awards from the New York Press Club. More recently, over on Substack, his Political Currents column has amassed a substantial following. Yet on top of all that, the author has kept up a steady output in fiction.

The new Glass Century is his third novel in seven years, and it feels nothing like a side project. Nearly five hundred pages, it works up a complex portrait of greater New York over the last half-century, calling to mind the later, baggier Richard Price. For Barkan, this amounts to a significant artistic break. His two previous fictions were considerably shorter and plottier, built around sturdy tropes like a dystopian, Musk-ified future or a violent coming of age. Glass Century, on the other hand, never lacks for event; it leaves its share of bruises⎯indeed, the catastrophe of 9/11 provides the climax⎯but its storytelling feels capacious, sauntering rather than hurtling. Its tour of the boroughs may leave out Staten Island, but it takes in Long Island; and if the materials feel lardy at times—with an awful lot about expressways, tunnels, and bridges—nonetheless what compels the main players comes across engagingly, and it isn’t making a buck, or a billion, but rather struggling to sustain family connection. Consider the novel’s final conversation, between a mother and her grown son, each under COVID lockdown in different neighborhoods:

“We keep going, Emmanuel. That’s it. I’m going to be at your side and then you’ll be there for your children.”
“I love you too…. I am starting to feel better.”
“We will call your father tomorrow.”

That man’s not home, rather off in another corner of town⎯in a hospital. By this point, though, we understand that for this family, such dispersal is the norm. The father, Saul Plotz, spends almost all of Glass Century married to another woman, with whom he has another couple of children, comfortably set up in one of Long Island’s Jewish suburbs. As for Emmanuel, in the final conversation, he’s Saul’s child by his younger lover Mona. For most of the son’s life, the affair was a secret, and yet also improbably more⎯an alternative marriage.

Mona too is Jewish, with a last name that fits the quirky pattern: Glass. Of course, J.D. Salinger constructs very different narratives, devoid of Barkan’s knockabout, but his Glass siblings are forever ill at ease in their skins, and in this, Saul and Mona could be cousins. Like Seymour’s “bananafish,” making pigs of themselves in their hideyhole, they’re on the verge of exploding.

Glass Century keeps the point of view shifting, dropping in on a good half-dozen characters, but the lovers take up most of the space, and in particular Mona. In that closing conversation, she’s in her seventies and struggling to keep her loved ones together. In the breakneck opening, not yet twenty-five, she’s “running because she always ran, her legs wired with muscle, her elbows firing.” There’s no rush, she’s only meeting friends, but her hustle is central to the woman. In an early showcase scene, though barely trained at tennis, Mona shows grit enough to beat a man at singles. Her eventual career also demands she stay light on her feet; she becomes a press photographer, and a couple of her scoops make for white-knuckle reading, among the fiction’s best sequences. Throughout all this, however, she suffers her own Glass-y disquiet. She’s living a lie, after all. At the opening, she’s desperate to hammer out the details of a fake wedding.

The charade works its magic, the ceremony small and another friend playing rabbi. After that, the trickiest part is keeping up appearances for her folks, old-school immigrant Brooklynites. Mona and Saul manage, however, keeping family get-togethers to restaurant dates, where Saul proves adept as a fixer, “scooping up conversational threads like a hungry point guard chasing loose balls.”

These skills serve him likewise well in state government, and at the novel’s start he’s Nelson Rockefeller’s man. He knows just how to handle the real estate tycoon Frederick Trump⎯and his off-kilter son Donald. Still, Mona’s a challenge, with no patience for talk of marriage and possessed of a strong kick: “No one owns me. No one claims me.” Saul can feel so bloated with her bananas that he’s about to burst. Out in his Long Island household, meantime, the estrangement keeps deepening: “They sat in air-conditioned semi-dark, the hum of the machine the only noise passing between them.” His children too drift away⎯his son Tad the only one to glimpse the father’s shadow self, and with that sent spinning cross-country, now an addict, now simply unhoused, flirting with suicide.

Tad’s eventual survival, however, adds a sparkling new narrative thread to the novel’s closing third. He returns to New York but not to the family, instead reinventing himself, working up an identity part criminal and part celebrity, and this transformation lends unexpected resonance to Mona’s, Saul’s, and even the teenage Emmanuel’s experience. This young man breathes further fresh life into Glass Century, as everyone feels their way into the twenty-first century. His late-teen dealing in study drugs makes for a sharp-cornered development that bangs into a splendid final surprise: the half-brother he never knew, who pops out of nowhere to play the savior. Together, the sons add a tasty finisher just as the central relationship was losing its flavor; Saul by then looks wimpy, decades past his one bold move⎯kissing Mona under the Unisphere out in Flushing Meadows. Mona remains the irreducible nugget in Barkan’s sprawl, at the end masking up for a Brooklyn bike ride, outrunning the virus and reminding herself and the rest of us: “Avoid downward spirals … always avoid downward spirals.”