The Wedding Prequel: A Mini-Vacation, With Complications

 

 

Our trip earlier this month was for the big event, our son’s marriage, and that is now safely encapsulated in the prior entry.  We prefaced that happy occasion by attempting to take a “mini” vacation.

 

One of my regrets when we were boating is that we never took our boat through the Cape Cod Canal and visited the ports along the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine coasts. We did push to more eastern points, Cuttyhunk, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, with the latter being the furthest of our trips. Those were mostly pre-Internet days, and my communication with my office was by phone. Had I had the opportunity to work remotely as we do today, no telling how far we might have gone.

Nantucket Morning 1986

 

Looking back at my former self, I wonder where I found the energy (and fearlessness) to do as much as we did. But, by the time I was able to cobble together as many as three weeks, we were looking to “settle down” in one port for as much as a week or more, and Block Island always seemed to serve that purpose.

 

So, fast forward to the problem of squeezing in some time on the Massachusetts coast around the time of the wedding: we are a couple of 40-year-old minds trapped in 80-year-old bodies. We failed to realistically take into account the vicissitudes of travel nowadays. As a planner (hey, if I didn’t carefully chart our boat trips before the days of GPS, we might have missed Nantucket altogether and wound up in Ireland!), I naturally looked for the best possible flight options, and from there, car rental and hotel stays.

 

What is the saying, man makes plans and God laughs? He/she/they had a good one on us.

 

We booked Delta as it had an ideal nonstop flight, leaving for Boston first thing in the morning, thus almost guaranteeing an on-time arrival since the plane would already be at our local PBI at departure time (PBI was its designation then; now it is the unspeakable DJT). There was also a return flight the following week in early afternoon, well after the morning rush hour to Boston. So we booked those flights, Thursday to the following Thursday, and arranged our trip to arrive in time for the wedding and do our mini vacation afterwards.

 

So everything sensible, yes?

 

No.

 

Delta changed the flight out of here to the early afternoon, meaning arriving in Boston at rush hour, if it was on time. And we would have to return the car for the only nonstop return flight, leaving Boston in the morning during rush hour. No way did we want to deal with either scenario on a weekday, so I was able to successfully reorient our trip, this time arriving Sunday and departing the following Sunday. This meant having our little holiday first, and then the wedding. OK, we can deal with it that way. And thus the plans were set.

 

But it still meant packing for a week, about 20 pounds of stuff for me and 50 for Ann (why does it always seem to work out 2:5, no matter how long the trip or the destination?). And the carry-ons, our essential medications and nowadays our chargers and other related electronics. In this case, we’re pretty even, so another 10 pounds each. All of this “stuff” would have to be lifted onto a bus which apparently was the only way to get from the Boston airport to their off-site rental car center.

 

So I protested.  Her reply was simple. We’ll ask the bus driver to help us.  Realizing Ann lives in the alternative universe of the civilized past, when we all got “dressed up” to get on a plane, when there would be people there to help you check in, and the digital kiosk did not exist, I nodded obediently.

 

While I sprung for the amusingly named “Comfort Class,” a joke airlines have designated to extract as much money as possible from those desiring those old civilized days, my frugality as a Costco member led to a car rental reservation through them. Their rental agency du jour when I booked was Budget Rental.

 

Doesn’t make much difference to me, I thought. We’re no longer “elite” since I no longer travel for work when once upon I time I had a Hertz fast track account. They want to make sure that when you really need the “advantages,” that’s when you should be denied them.

 

For a hotel, we chose the Salem Waterfront Hotel, centrally located for where we wanted to visit, eliminating the need to check in and out of different hotels. And, because of boating, I’m a sucker for waterfront. Naturally, the hotel is not on the waterfront. I should have known, as the price was less than a bazillion bucks a night. But it was a good choice, rooms with spacious accommodations and very well located, only a block from Salem Harbor.

 

So, believe it or not, no complaints there. But I digress to the departure from PBI.

 

Not surprisingly, the flight was late, but only by an hour, which nowadays is a minor miracle. Naturally, every seat was filled, and I was left to get our small carry-ons up into the overhead bins, competing with people already seated who had chosen to put large luggage in the overheads which I would have checked, or would have considered just driving it all in a U-Haul, forgetting about flying.

 

But the real fun was at the Boston airport, finally retrieving our luggage, two medium-sized suitcases, 32 and 38 pounds respectively (remember, though, the 2:5 ratio of their contents).

 

We finally found the “line,” really a crush of people following the laws of Social Darwinism, trying to get on the “bus” to the off-site rent-a-car center. This vehicle was really three or four buses connected by flexible rubber so it looked like a long snake. My hat is off to the driver of such a contraption, but even if we were lucky enough to be able to board at the front, no way he or she (or maybe it was a humanoid) would have looked at us and taken pity on our struggle with four suitcases, having to not only lift them up two steep steps but then onto a higher rack.

 

For the first time since my open-heart surgery fifteen years ago, I thought I could feel the heavy-duty steel wires holding my breastbone together cry out for restraint. I think someone actually volunteered to help with the heaviest one, and to that chivalrous stranger, my thanks.

 

If only the agony ended there: on to the car rental.

 

We were herded from the snake bus into a corral where other cattle like us were standing in a zigzag line of untold numbers to get to the Budget/Avis rental counters. Apparently, those companies had merged to benefit the shareholders.

 

People ahead of us said someone who had just got his car remarked it was a two-and-a-half-hour wait. Maybe, I thought, these people too were clever Costco members. What a deal! Perhaps many of these people prepaid their rentals for an even better deal! I didn’t go for that option, I guess, for situations just like this.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, way down the airline-hangar-sized building, I saw nearly empty Alamo counter, an attendant on duty. I watched the luggage on line and asked Ann to go down there and check if they could rent us a car for a week.

 

They had two unreserved cars left, including the same stripped-down Toyota I had reserved at Budget. So we left our line and got a car. I wish that was the end of this part of the story.

 

I had already set the route from a myriad of Google Map choices, trying to avoid dark coastal roads and the one it preferred, into Boston via major toll roads and then out of Boston using the same. I was not going to drive into Boston merely to go northeast to Salem.

 

This car was perfectly fine, but basic. I had to get used to inserting the ignition key into the steering post, like in the old days. The shift was no longer on the steering post but on the floor and I kept turning on the wipers when shifting. The luggage compartment could not be opened except from an inside latch right next to the gas latch and, at night, not illuminated, although there was an option on the key, that is if you can see it in the dark and don’t turn on the alarm by mistake.

 

But the main problem getting to the hotel was that Google Maps did not want to do what it was told. It had us going through backstreets, strange neighborhoods, even what I thought were a few dirt roads. I was looking for 1A North signs, which AI had promised me there would be a surfeit of, but there were none. Perhaps I would wind up in a suburb of Baltimore, a neighborhood-to-neighborhood drive with the GPS continuing to say my destination is right around the corner?

 

OK, I exaggerate to make the point that, in spite of all this technology, life in many ways has become more difficult for people accustomed to a TripTik from AAA. I could have followed that! But Baltimore never emerged, and one hour-plus later we drove into the Salem Waterfront Hotel parking lot.

 

We had ambitious plans to visit Gloucester the next day, but we were actually grateful that the next day, a Monday, was rainy and we could rest. So alas, Gloucester and Rocky Neck were taken off our wish list.

 

Thankfully the hotel had a nice restaurant, and so we recovered that Monday, staying at the hotel, unpacking, rethinking our overly ambitious trip, and deciding to stay off the roads the following day and explore Salem.

 

We had decided on Salem as our home base as it was within easy driving distance of other places we wanted to visit. Another motivation was that, after recently seeing The Crucible (and having been associated with my college production of it sixty years earlier) I wanted to see that setting. Even without that draw, there is its waterfront setting, no doubt one of the cities we would have docked in had we boated further north when we were younger.

 

Much of Salem for the visitor consists of witch museums, cemeteries, and the like, such as the hangings.

 

This did not interest us, yet another reason to stay at a hotel away from the tumult. And indeed the crowds were drawn there, leaving us with mostly the waterfront and part of a day to explore the House of the Seven Gables, which became the subject of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel.

 

He lived in Salem, and in fact his birthplace has been moved onto those grounds. The famed house, when Hawthorne wrote his novel, had already been changed from seven gables to three to fit architectural trends at the time, but he had heard stories about it when it had seven, and that number stuck, inspiring his imagining it in the novel. Later owners turned it into a museum and restored the seven gables, even constructing a secret passageway that is implied in the novel but did not exist until the house became famous as a tourist site and museum.

 

Hawthorne Birthplace

So between the House of the Seven Gables, the original home of Hawthorne’s birth, and the beautiful gardens, all looking over Salem Harbor, its historic and literary significance, and 19th-century beauty, made it an ideal destination for us.

 

And it was within walking distance of our hotel, a bonus. We passed the little “Waite & Peirce” National Park Service building, with its pretty clapboard structure built sometime in the early 19th century.

 

Diagonally across the street is the 1815 Customs House, where Hawthorne worked for three years before being ousted by a new administration (the political spoils system; nothing has really changed), which he excoriated in his introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter, “The Custom-House.” (“Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.”…Nathaniel Hawthorne)

 

That building is directly across from historic Derby Wharf, which early one morning, as the sun was rising, I walked the entire length to the Derby Wharf Light Station. It was a beautiful morning but becoming hot and humid, not unlike Florida, a disappointment for us remembering the cooler days and especially nights of the Northeast.

 

This bulkhead/wharf reminded me so much of the famous historic stone harbor wall, The Cobb, in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, although an altogether different construction, a true seawall whereas Derby Wharf was a commercial wharf. But walking nearly a half mile into the harbor and back that morning, the connection could not escape me.

 

Salem has great seafood, and not coincidentally, we had dinner that night overlooking Derby Wharf at the Sea Level Oyster Bar, a favorite among locals.

 

The next morning we got Google Maps to behave and drove to the quiet coastal village of Beverly Farms, where I had hoped to capture a sense of the life John Updike where he wrote and lived for years. The high point was a visit to the Beverly Farms Bookstore, which Updike frequented during his stay there, and we thought the back room still had a sort of shrine to him.

 

Well, thankfully, that independent bookstore is still there, but the so-called shrine had shrunk to but a few of his books. I guess time erases everything, although according to the owner, Updike’s son was recently there to promote his father’s Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, which she showed me. At nearly 900 pages, there was no room left in the suitcases to carry it back home.

 

Updike’s output, poems, short stories, novels, criticism, these letters, was prodigious. He virtually documented his entire life in fiction and nonfiction. I don’t think there is an American writer who comes close.

One of the blessings of an independent bookstore is the knowledgeable owner, and she and Ann got into a discussion about Jane Austen. She said to Ann, “I think you’d like this book,” handing her a copy of The Wedding People by Alison Espach, not known to Ann, a voracious reader. She bought it and, in the next two days, at night, read the entire book (ironic title given we were going to the wedding in a few days), or I should say inhaled it. So that chance meeting led to this satisfying experience. Updike led us to it!

 

We strolled Beverly, drove down the street where he lived, but still weary from our trip, made our way back to the hotel and another great seaside restaurant for lunch, Finz, and then, to prove we were really just tourists, took the sightseeing trolley to get a good sense of the city of Salem. Naturally the tour focused on the witches, the cemetery, etc, but we were exhausted and glad to sit for an hour on such a tour. A high point for us was the Federal-style homes on Chestnut Street, many more than 200 years old, a step back in time.

 

We had made a reservation well in advance for that night’s dinner at Turner’s Seafood at Lyceum Hall, considered a Salem institution with some of the best seafood in New England. The hotel had a jitney to get us there and we Ubered back, so we did not have to do battle with the GPS to get there and park.

 

The restaurant was everything it was purported to be, historic and welcoming. We shared Cherrystone clams, an award-winning lobster bisque, a dish called Tuna Nachos, the most exquisite arrangement of slivers of fresh tuna on a house-baked nacho cracker with wasabi, soy sauce and scallions and other house specialties that lived up to their reputation, and finally, a swordfish and Italian sausage over linguini with fresh ricotta and sun-dried tomatoes (I have my wife to thank for remembering all those details).

 

For our final day we had planned to visit Marblehead, Salem’s immediate neighbor to the south, so it was a nice scenic drive, first to Chandler Hovey Park, with breathtaking views of the Marblehead Lighthouse and the literal hundreds (thousands?) of sailboats in the harbor and the Corinthian Yacht Club.

 

From there we went to the town, where parking is nearly impossible, but drove around on those little curvy 18th-century streets until we found a spot.

 

There Ann found a little boutique store which, naturally, had a “sale” on summer clothing, “coincidentally” just the kind she wears! Also, the careful planning of the store’s owner had provided a “husband’s chair” where I could productively check emails and get out of the heat. The interesting part of the visit (aside from two must-have-half-price outfits) was the story the owner told Ann: that she had been divorced about 50 years ago and the store became her passion, you might say her new marriage partner. And she got to meet interesting people, like Ann!

 

By then we were ready for what Ann had an obsessive craving for ever since we arrived in Salem: lobster. I can eat lobster, but I am no longer a big “fan,” as I once had a lobster license in Connecticut and tended enough lobster pots, which led to our eating LOTS of lobster over those years. I pretty much had my fill, but Ann still loves it, and what better place to have it than a local place, The Barnacle Restaurant, a no-frills, incredibly casual spot, but perched right over the ocean water with views of Fort Sewall.

 

We got there in the nick of time, Ann finally opting for the lobster roll, which was said to have all the lobster you would get in a one-pounder without all the work. This restaurant has its own lobster boat, so it doesn’t get much fresher than that. Here you can see Ann gleefully waiting at our table overlooking the water.

 

The final day was packing in the morning, checking out, and then driving to Sudbury, MA, to visit with our friends Bonnie and Bruce, whom we would see at the wedding the next day. I insisted on a photograph before we headed out to lunch, in the same spot where Bruce and I stood some 50 years earlier in his home in Sudbury (nifty zip code, 01776). And so here we were, then and now.

 

We followed them to one of their favorite lunch spots, Stephen Anthony’s, which Bruce aptly describes as “a staple of the old and doddering.” I followed his lead, having two poached eggs over corned beef hash with their homemade sausage. Better than lobster to me!

 

And from there we drove (all back roads again) to our hotel where coincidentally, at the very same time Jonathan and Tracie were arriving from NYC, so we finally had help with our luggage. Thus, that night marked the onset of the wedding festivities The Long Journey to Chris and Megan’s Day

 

But to close the circle of horrific travel, the day after the wedding, Sunday, we had to catch a 9:00 a.m. flight out of Logan and we were an hour away by car. We had to return the car to the rental center, get on the snaking bus, and then check in at the airport. We got up at 4:45 a.m. to start this ordeal.

 

I figured early Sunday morning should present ideal conditions, especially as the weather was cooperative and our plane was already at the airport. What could go wrong?

 

Indeed, the drive there on the Mass Turnpike was a piece of cake. I was hoping the car rental center would be easy to navigate at this time, but no such luck, frantically waving attendants directing cars into tightly packed lines until finally we were able to park and unload.

 

Back to the four heavy suitcases, which we were finally able to maneuver to the snaking bus, but, again, hordes of other people boarding. I got our suitcases on, got off at Delta, but there was no curbside check-in, and I was absolutely stunned that at 6:30 on a Sunday morning the Delta counters and TSA lines were jammed, the latter seemingly as far as the eye could see.

 

But first, we had to check in, and really the only option was the kiosk, which for us, with my tickets in my iPhone “wallet” was not exactly easy. We were clearly having difficulty. A young woman who was sitting with her grandmother, Internet- and technology-savvy, saw our consternation, took pity on us, and offered to help. What a savior, and we finally printed out our luggage tags.

 

Now the problem was getting the luggage to the Delta counter, for which there was another long line. Our young, savvy damsel said, “Wait here,” and she hopped the rope to the counter and explained to someone at Delta check-in that she was trying to assist two very old people drop off their luggage, so the attendant waved us in. So there are good stories to be told about someone who went the distance for us. Thank you. We’ll try to pass it on.

 

But then there was the TSA line. No way could Ann stand in it and we had an early flight to catch. It didn’t seem to be moving, so we asked for a wheelchair for her. She was given a wheelchair, but there were other people waiting in wheelchairs and there seemed to be only one attendant.

 

Therefore, I walked down the TSA line and finally found a Delta attendant who asked to see my “wallet” and said that there was another line farther down, but a very short one as we had PreCheck (naturally, no signs indication such a line). So, like a miracle, Ann arose from her wheelchair, and no sense recounting our other experiences along the way as we were 99% home, except for the flight, which left on time!

 

I said in my original entry that we would have walked to the wedding if we had to. Turned out, we did a lot of that, but it was an event we would not have missed for the world.

 

Salem Harbor as Viewed from House of Seven Gables

A Late Encounter with a Young Novelist, Ross Barkan

 

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.