For some time now, I’ve been in a fiction-reading funk.
Part of this has to do with the brave new digital world and getting wrapped up
in the hyperventilating coverage of our American carnage. But perhaps leaning
into that feeling is also the passing—or gradual silencing—of my literary
heroes.
I particularly related to John Updike’s fiction. He was
about ten years older than I am. His five Rabbit novels, chronicling the life
of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, were published between 1960 and 2001—years that
coincided with the most formative period of my adult life. I read all of his
fiction and was struck by how far afield he sometimes went from the Rabbit
books: the epic The Beauty of the Lilies;
the visionary Toward the End of Time
(a remarkable 1997 novel set in the then-future year of 2020, with society on
the verge of collapse even as the outward normalcy of life continues); and Terrorist (2007), the last major novel
of his lifetime, where he took on the problem of modern extremism.
Even if Updike had only been a short-story writer, his
200-plus stories would have placed him on a plane with John Cheever. Add to
that his essays and poems, many written for The
New Yorker, the publication with which he is most closely associated. There
is no writer who can match his productivity and level of art. He was the Babe
Ruth of American letters.
Philip Roth is a close second in my mind: a great
novelist expressing other aspects of American—and Jewish—angst. Between Updike and Roth I felt I had a miner’s safety hat and beacon with which to plumb the depths of the contemporary American soul.
They were writing the great American novels of my
time—the golden ring earlier chased by Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway.
There are many other contemporary American writers I
continue to try to read—Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen, et al. But
others, Richard Yates, Paul Auster, and James Salter have passed away, and
Richard Ford and Louis Begley have succumbed to aging. Ford’s five Frank
Bascombe novels are reminiscent of Updike’s Rabbit quintet, with Be Mine (2023 bringing closure to the character and making it unlikely
that others will follow. His 2017 memoir, Between
Them: Remembering My Parents, helped spur the idea of writing my own.
Nonetheless, I continued my quest to seek a new novelist
who writes in the vein I so admired when younger—a writer who simply speaks to
me and my era, passé though I may be in my references and sentimentalism.
The times hang heavily—and by times I mean both the
temper of the era and my remaining time. The combination is a toxic mix for
reading fiction, though not necessarily for consuming the political disaster du
jour, which The New York Times and a
number of Substack essayists report
on repeatedly. The New Yorker
recently reported that “in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has
declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion,
one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon,” a trend I found myself
embodying.
It was probably through Substack, a year or two ago, that I came across Ross Barkan. Two
attributes hooked me: he is a New York City boy (I can call him that as he’s
less than half my age), and if you set him loose on a topic—frequently NYC
politics, something I’m far removed from now—he can write up a storm.
He wears another writing hat as a cofounder and Editor in
Chief of The Metropolitan Review. It harks back to the traditions of the Parisian
literary salon and is reminiscent to the “Little Magazines” of the 20’s and 30’s
devoted to literature, culture and intellectual thought. It’s quite an undertaking, and seemingly effortless
on his part.
When I first “met” him on Substack, he was hawking a book he was writing, Glass Century, even having the chutzpah
to imply it might be the next great American novel (I don’t recall him saying
that exactly, but the implication was there). He had published a few things
before, but nothing on that scale. I said to myself: fine—publish the book,
I’ll read the reviews, and then I’ll consider it.
He easily got blurbs and some notices, but not even The New York Times reviewed the book
when it was published in early May of this year. (Unfortunately, the major
publishers all passed on the book, which was finally published by Tough Poets
Press. It’s difficult for small presses to get exposure in the major review
media. Those major publishers may regret their decision one day.) So I still
hung back, occupied with finishing my own memoir, Explaining It: A Life Between the Lines, getting through the summer, and then recovering from an
illness that further delayed my return to possibly reading fiction.
Unread novels are now stacked in my study. I occasionally
pick one up, read a few pages, lose interest, and guiltily put it back on my
“to be read” shelf—only to repeat the process weeks later. Nothing seemed to
hold my attention long enough. There was a time when I lived for the next novel
by my favorite writers.
So it was a kind of stalemate. Yet Barkan’s Substack essays kept arriving, each one
meaningful. I learned he had even run for office, with a young Zohran Mamdani
as his campaign manager. He didn’t win (seen in retrospect, a victory for both
of them in terms of life paths).
Eventually though I ordered Glass Century for my ever-expanding “to be read” shelves. When it
arrived, I looked it over carefully and read about the contents. The cover
unsettled me: the Twin Towers are pictured, and that wound still runs deep in my psyche.
Did I really want to read fiction about the agony of that
day? It was clear that some characters would be victims and others left to grieve.
If I became emotionally invested, I too would be impacted. Did I want to relive
9/11 yet again?
For weeks, the book sat untouched.
Eventually, curiosity—or perhaps the need to break the
silence of my study—won out. I finally
picked it up, perhaps hoping the NYC focus would help me snap out of the
reading funk.
It begins with a most improbable event: an ersatz wedding
between the two main characters, Saul Plotz and Mona Glass, in 1973. The
wedding is staged for Mona’s conventional Jewish parents, who want her to
settle down and produce grandchildren. She’s in her early twenties, but those
were still the times. She and Saul have been carrying on an affair; she was his
student at City College. Saul is already married, with two children, and ten
years older.
Hold the presses! How unlikely is this plot device? Even
if only a few know the truth at this pretend wedding, how could it not
eventually be discovered by the parents? I found the premise nearly
preposterous. But I read on, perhaps because Mona was described as an
up-and-coming tennis star and, as tennis is the one sport I still play, I
thought: show me what you’ve got in your imagination, Barkan, when it comes to
tennis.
Well, a few dozen pages into the book, he did.
I set the stage. The protagonist, Mona Glass, is playing
tennis as a 24-year-old on New York City courts around the time Billie Jean
King played Bobby Riggs (oh, how I remember the hoopla over that event). Mona
is a naturally gifted player who didn’t have the advantages of private lessons
enjoyed by many of the women she plays, including her best friend, Liv, whom
she now routinely beats.
On this particular day, Mona is playing—no,
destroying—Liv on a court adjacent to two men pounding the ball. A couple of
times, Mona’s ball rolls onto their court, interfering with their play. The
third time it happens, one of the men, Alec, snaps: “Ladies, if you can’t keep
your ball on your own court, you shouldn’t be out here.”
Mona goes ballistic. She is intense on the tennis court,
her skill and moxie making up for a shortage of lessons. She challenges him to
a one-on-one match, best of three. He is goaded into accepting, and that’s
where the following six pages pick up. The first sentence of the first page is
not complete, so add: “She had hardly noticed how he played. He was a man,” and
then the text continues below.
To me, this writing captures the raw truth of the sport
in the way a piece of program music captures a feeling. By then, I was not only
hooked on the novel but, coincidentally, at about the same time, Barkan
published a remarkable essay on Substack,
“On the Beach: Glass Century, and the relationships that make up a life.”
Having just published my memoir, I was particularly drawn
to this observation: “The act of writing creates a counter, an immediate
parallel universe. Even memoir is a form of fabrication, memories leaky unless
they’re eidetic, and you’re left to plumb what is essentially a form of
darkness—not evil, but the absence of immediacy.”
His novel is indeed a window into his life. I had been
asking myself how Barkan could have dreamed up this material—the development of
two parallel families sharing the same father. Reading his essay clarified that
question. It made clear how what I had initially dismissed as preposterous plot
devices made perfect sense within the context of his life and became natural in
the novel.
The frankness and transparency of the essay reveal the
novelist’s mind at work. And at long last, here was a novel in the form I love:
an epic spanning roughly fifty years—from the era of my second marriage through
the Covid years—set in the city I still love, even from a distance.
Barkan’s father was a distinctly Philip Roth–like
character. In my opinion, Roth’s finest novel is American Pastoral. Writing about Jewish fathers and sons, Roth observes:
“[The fathers] were men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep
going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.”
The heart of Glass Century is the
father/son relationship and Barkan’s love for his own father—while the mother
who raised Barkan becomes the foundation for the central character of Mona
Glass.
My own memoir includes a few short stories, not because I
consider myself an accomplished creative writer—far from it, having no such
formal education—but because they indirectly reflect my life in some way. While
those stories are not memoir, they carry the redolence of lived experience.
They inhabit an imagined world of what might have been, not necessarily what
was. There is always some form of memoir in fiction and fiction in memoir.
Barkan, I think, would agree with this.
His essay “On the Beach” explicitly ties events and
characters to aspects of the novel. Barkan describes himself as an “unrepentant
beach obsessive,” sharing his father’s interests in baseball and politics,
describing him as “an inveterate yenta on politics and sports and the city.”
Details such as his father living a double life; seeing Richard Nixon in an
elevator and talking Mets; attending high school with the man who later became
right-wing radio star Michael Savage; the Chinese buffet Barkan and his father
frequented; and the fact that his father had a doctor’s appointment on 9/11 drawing
him away from a Twin Tower office, all make oblique appearances in the novel.
Here are some of Barkan’s key observations on how the
novel came into being:
“My parents’ drive for secrecy had convinced me it was
best to swat away inconvenience. I could imagine, rather, nothing was wrong.
And isn’t that what writers do anyway? Imagine? … [T]here remained an
unexplained psychic barrier to such probing, one that held my tongue in place.
In these lacunae, at least, I could devise my own fictions… The novel, as
antediluvian as it might seem in this tech-addled age, was my totem, and I
considered it the highest art form—or the art form, at least, where I could
channel my skill into an object that would achieve permanence.”
The self-revelatory nature of the essay is evident:
“Fiction, fiction! I love it so. My father would have
liked to have read all of this, and I lament that I never showed him a draft of
the novel before he died. If he was secretive, he appreciated a good show, and
as a deep admirer of Roth, he could never begrudge the writers who raided their
own lives. A meditative memoir and essay like this one would conventionally
conclude, in some form, with the old father-son heart-to-heart, all secrets
revealed, all threads tied, closure obtained. That’s not how it works with
flawed people.”
I will leave the rest of the novel’s machinery for the
reader to discover. Even without the roadmap of Barkan's essays, I would still
have found Glass Century a satisfying
journey, though some elements of the resolution strain credulity. I needn’t go
into those here; as a first effort, this is a meaningful page-turner. I’m
grateful simply to be back in the swing of reading fiction, and I have Ross
Barkan to thank for that.
Reading Barkan reminded me of a conviction I shared in a
2012 essay, “The Novel as Social History,” where I made the case that few historians can capture the zeitgeist of an era
better than some of our novelists. In my time, Updike and Philip Roth were on
the cutting edge, and before them John Dos Passos, among others. I think of Glass Century as belonging to that
tradition of social commentary and lived history.
Barkan is dreaming big. He has a forthcoming novel, Colossus, and another (yet to be titled)
that he is presently completing. As if he hasn’t already thoroughly examined
the writing process in his “On the Beach” Substack
essay, he goes further in “The Alchemy of the Novel,” a recent piece published
in Arcade Publishing’s newsletter (Arcade being the publisher of Colossus, scheduled for April 2026,
roughly a year after Glass Century).
There he writes:
“Describing a novel is always a challenge, especially one
you wrote, but I can say it’s about a successful, wealthy pastor [Teddy Starr]
in a rural Michigan town who is harboring a dark secret. Set in the present
day—this is a novel for our new Trump age, and our pastor is certainly an
admirer of the president—and written in the first person, it’s both a departure
from my last novel, Glass Century,
and a continuation of a project that I hope will fully see the light of day
soon. I am in the process of a loose trilogy, what I’m calling my American
Saga, that will grapple with the American condition from the 1970s through the
2020s. The untitled third novel in this set, which is nearly done, will share a
certain current, and maybe a universe, with Colossus.”
“The Alchemy of the Novel,” along with “On the Beach,” is
an important examination of the urgency to write and publish relevant fiction
for our times. As Barkan says, “Readers are weary of the moralistic fiction
that peaked sometime in the 2010s or early 2020s, and they want literature, I
believe, that more properly reflects the curiosity and even chaos of the human
condition.” Indeed!
I was accustomed to waiting years—sometimes decades—for a
new Rabbit novel by John Updike or a new Frank Bascombe novel by Richard Ford.
Not one a year, but spaced out over a lifetime. Now, suddenly, that old sense
of anticipation has come rushing back.
