Ross Barkan's recent novel, Colossus, returns to a theme he explored in Glass Century: concealed family relationships and the reinvention of self in an unmoored America.
The subject is clearly a personal one for Barkan, but unlike Glass Century, which often felt driven by emotion, Colossus initially seems more intellectual than heartfelt. Only about halfway through does the novel reveal the emotional core that has been hidden beneath its portrait of a declining Americana. I found myself wondering whether Barkan might have developed the story more chronologically rather than withholding so much of Teddy Starr's back story until Part Two. Yet there is method in the structure. By delaying the revelation of Starr's origins, Barkan creates a mystery that sustains the reader through the novel's opening movement.
Teddy Starr is the pastor of Trinity Church in Pine Haven, a fictional Michigan town. At first he resembles a fox among the hens of his congregation, pursuing unhappy parishioners' wives with a confidence that John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom might have admired while simultaneously cashing in on local real estate opportunities in a manner reminiscent of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe.
The Richard Ford influence is impossible to miss. Barkan even opens with an epigram from The Sportswriter: "All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life." Indeed, Teddy Starr has shut the door on his past and like Bascombe, Starr also becomes a real estate agent, giving him a unique vantage point on his community (and ability to profit on it): “A realtor is a showman, a handmaiden, and advertiser for your arriving life, the one you want to live.”
And it is in his depiction of Pine Haven that Barkan’s writing truly excels. The town becomes a miniature America, where affluent retirees and struggling laborers live only blocks apart, and where chain restaurants, economic anxieties, and cultural fragmentation define the landscape. The novel's greatest strength may be its portrait of contemporary middle-America, observed with both affection and skepticism. The area’s annual Flapjack Festival is its entertainment pinnacle.
Starr himself is not particularly admirable. He is married to Daniella and the father of three children, yet he moves through life in the community assuming privileges he has never earned. He cheats almost casually, regarding temptation as one of the benefits of being Teddy Starr. His rationalizations are often revealing, particularly when he reflects on the limitations facing women in Pine Haven and quietly congratulates himself for having "sought my advantages."
Yet Starr does not entirely escape consequences. His relationship with his pubescent son Theodore is strained, and the estrangement between fathers and sons becomes one of the novel's recurring concerns. Here again one hears echoes of Richard Ford.
There are comparisons to Sinclair Lewis as well. Although Starr is no Elmer Gantry, Lewis's skeptical eye toward Main Street America hovers over much of the first half of the novel. Then comes the event that changes everything: a mysterious man begins following Starr and claims to be his brother.
From that moment the novel pivots.
Barkan signals the turn with one of the book's most powerful passages, a meditation on secrets, reinvention, and the curtains we draw between ourselves and the past:
“Imagine Daniella now what she would say, another man calling the only child, Theodore Starr a brother. Imagine, really, what Daniella would say if she knew it all, even this afternoon with Guinevere, if whatever she suspects matches up against vertiginous reality, if she can even produce a notion. But few can. Few can fathom what waits behind the curtain. Curtains are thick, after all, and it’s a greater feat than it looks to pull one back, to force one back. And what if only disease and rot are behind them? What if, by closing the curtain, you escaped it all, as any individual with a modicum of intellect and ambition would? This is the pioneer spirit, the American Mundus, reinvention to starve or perdition, to work your way closer to God, the true God. And my brother, and his people, knew nothing of that.“
Suddenly the reader is thrust backward into another life entirely.
Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, Part Two reveals that Teddy Starr (né Reuvain Gantz) was raised in Brooklyn and that his origins are far removed from the evangelical Protestant identity he has constructed. The details emerge gradually, but the central conflict is familiar: family expectations versus personal freedom.
His father, an overbearing, workaholic collector of apartment buildings and something of a slumlord, expects his son to inherit the business (one of course can draw parallels to a certain contemporary figure). The prospect repels him. Ironically, it is his brother who is being groomed for scholarship and religious life. The burden of expectation hangs heavily over the household.
How Reuvain becomes Teddy Starr is the heart of the novel. Two figures shape that transformation: Talia, his first youthful love, and Teddy, an extraordinary Asian handball player whose influence proves even more significant.
The handball sequences are among the finest passages in the book. Much as tennis functioned as a metaphor in Glass Century, handball becomes a metaphor for life itself—competition, discipline, courage, and self-definition. On the handball court even the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans defer to Teddy. “It was fury, and it was a dance. With balletic rage, he rearranged the geometry of the courts, his ball cracking low against the wall, unreachable every time.”
Eventually Reuvain must confront his father: “I anticipated, always, my father‘s rage. I was like a mariner reading the clouds for a rainstorm. I had chosen the handball courts over him, and I would pay.“ He accuses his father of running “a gutter empire” and soon the confrontation becomes deadly.
He flees Brooklyn. He borrows his new first name from his handball court mentor and as he boards a random bus to Detroit, he sees a neon sign “Starr and Co., Deli” and so life changes for the reborn “Teddy Starr” and he ultimately begins the life we have already seen unfolding in Pine Haven.
Part Three examines the consequences of that reinvention. The truths Starr has concealed are exposed to his wife, his congregation, and his community. Daniella's furious assessment of him as a fraudulent outsider cuts directly to the novel's central concern: how much of a life can be built upon invention before the structure collapses?
Forced to confront his congregation, Starr prepares to deliver his sermon and confession: “they shimmer, my flock, even as they begin to bend my way, their wet lips crinkling, curiosity, commingling with fury… I feel oxidized and ancient like the same statue was striding the Rhodesian Harbor, my brassy flesh, collapsing into the brine. They gape at my crumbling.”
Yet this is also a novel about America, and America has always had a remarkable capacity for reinvention. Time passes. Wounds heal. The disgraced pastor discovers that public life remains open to him. Indeed, he is even offered an even greater opportunity: a run for Congress.
The irony is unmistakable. The man who built his life on concealment and reinvention is rewarded rather than punished. One might even view his ascent as a metaphorical ride UP the escalator to seize the golden ring of success. Yet Barkan's point is not simply political. Teddy Starr embodies a distinctly American belief that identity is endlessly renewable, that the past can be escaped, rewritten, or transformed into advantage, no matter how corrupt that past might have been. Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby similarly tried to hide a past in his delusional pursuit of the American Dream.
In Colossus, Ross Barkan has produced a worthy successor to Glass Century and an impressive second installment in what appears to be an emerging trilogy examining authenticity, family, ambition, and American political life.
One final note. I found the hardcover's overall low-contrast typographical design and leading to be tiring on older eyes during extended reading. A minor complaint, but one worth mentioning.
And a coda, totally unrelated, sunrise this morning during my daily early walk…
