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.

 

 

"Philip Roth," an Encyclopedic Biography by Blake Bailey

 

Cynthia Ozick, a fellow intellectual, a long time friend of Philip Roth, wrote THE review of Blake Bailey’s biography, Philip Roth.  She says that “its nature is that of Dostoyevskian magnitude.”  I was thinking Dickensian in its cast of characters and encyclopedic magnitude.  If Bailey’s biography is definitive, Ozick’s review of the biography is equally authoritative,

I’ve accumulated some ten pages of notes on Roth’s remarkable life and achievements from this biography, but to what end?  I still have that habit from college days: taking notes.  But looking them over, and having read Ozick’s review, I am tossing all that detail to simply mull about general themes. 

There has been much controversy regarding Roth choosing Bailey to write his biography, the general theme being one misogynist finding another.  This has been fodder for the cancel culture and to me nonsense, completely irrelevant to what Bailey has accomplished.  I addressed that controversy in this entry and although it makes reference to my Kindle edition, I successfully acquired the original clothbound edition, which has always been my preference reading this 2 to 3 pound tome (and taking notes!) mostly in bed in the evening.

From Bailey’s acknowledgements:  “[Roth’s] cooperation was honorable and absolute. He gave me every particle of pertinent information, no matter how intimate, and let me make of it what I would (after telling me, often exhaustedly, what I ought to make of it)….One lovely sun-dappled afternoon I sat on his studio couch, listening to our greatest living novelist empty his bladder [at a nearby bathroom], and reflected that this is as good as it gets for an American literary biographer.”    I think Roth would be pleased by the results, even where Bailey strays from what Roth might have wanted, by the sheer detailed shaping of his life, an ocean into which the reader is totally immersed.

This is as much a treatise on the art of writing, at least at the level that Roth wrote, as it is the details of his life.  His commitment to writing, except for brief interludes, primarily because of health, was absolute.  In his Connecticut home that meant from morning to late afternoon in his separate studio, with a brief break for lunch, usually with someone staying with him at the time, his wife, his friend, or his current lover.  Like Updike, who he generally admired although also greatly in competition with, he could compartmentalize his writing routine, leading to 31 novels.  I wonder whether he (Updike) worked with as much angst as did Roth.  While both novelists saw themselves as the leading writers of their generation, I see (in my mind) Roth with his shoulder to the plow, compared to Updike seemingly effortlessly toiling in the fields of fiction.  This is not to distract from the accomplishments of either, both capturing the American experience in their writing from different perspectives.  Yet, neither writer won the Nobel Prize; disgraceful. This had more to do with the politics of the Prize than it did with their work.

This biography spoke directly to me because of place.  Most of his adult life Roth lived on the Upper West Side of NYC and in Warren CT.  As fame and fortune mounted, he would buy up adjacent apartments and renovate his CT house to include a separate writing studio.  Roth’s roots eventually ran deep in Connecticut and the Upper West Side and I understand why, and can even feel it having lived in both places.

He was only nine years older than I am so the historical bookmarks of his life are indelibly imprinted in me as well.  As Bailey writes about Roth, there is a sensory recollection of the times we shared.  Even without this personal factor, anyone who reads this biography will be struck by its intimacy.  This is more than the story of a life well lived and of an extraordinary man, but one gets to know him like a good friend, accepting his foibles as well as reveling in his accomplishments.  It’s as if Bailey has positioned him as a protagonist in a novel, one with whom we deeply empathize.

His first wife, Maggie, tricked him into marriage through a fake pregnancy test.  She was a troubled woman who had two kids.  Roth was good to them.  His second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote a scathing memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.  Roth wanted a “corrective biography.”  He got that and more from Bailey.

He was a man who gathered friends, lovers, disciples, ex-lovers who became friends or enemies, a man of enormous magnetism.  They, and the mind of the writer, through his alter ego fictional character Nathan Zuckerman, were fair game in Roth’s fiction.  In his copy of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” he noted “Family as the maker of character.  Family as the primary, shaping influence.  Unending relevance of childhood.”  Bailey opines, “For him it was consummately so, and hard to say where one parent ended and the other began in the formation of his own character.”  He brought this into his literature and into his relationships, even sometimes acting as an ersatz grandparent to the children of ex-girlfriends

Roth was a man of titanic intellect and he did not suffer fools.  Yet he was a man of great generosity, serving as a mentor to other writers, a teacher, a supporter of Czech dissidents, and as a savior to friends (frequently ex lovers).  It was not unusual for Roth to open up his wallet, sometimes anonymously, to help friends, or people who helped him, with education or even living expenses.  Several were there at the end.  He sometimes expected friends who he considered his intellectual equal to be readers of first drafts of his writings.

His political leanings were decidedly liberal, although sometimes libertarian.  He cried when FDR died.  He lampooned Richard Nixon (even being mentioned in the Watergate tapes, Nixon saying to Haldeman: “Roth, of course, is a Jew.”)  Reagan did not escape his political ire, “a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable, soap-opera grandmother…and with the intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical….American–style philistinism run amuck.”  He privately thought George W. Bush was the reincarnation of “the devil.”  He didn’t live long enough to suffer and comment on the entire Trump Presidency, but a New Yorker article quotes him saying that Trump was “ignorant of government, of history, science, philosophy, or, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words that is better called Jerkish than English.“  Bailey comments that he liked to say “I’m eagerly awaiting my White House tweet.“

I’ve written before of his decision to stop writing, and his interview on that subject only scratches the surface of his thoughts on the matter.  

Blake Bailey’s work is an important achievement.  Is it biased?  Perhaps, but is admiration a biased position?  Bailey introduced me to nuances in his fiction as well as works I have still not read.  Roth was concerned about the decline of the American novel and rightfully so.  Who can ever take his place? 

The sheer size of Blake Bailey’s work, more than 800 pages with almost 90 pages of footnotes (much of it from primary sources) and index, makes it a veritable encyclopedia of Philip Roth.  It is a labor of love and faultless scholarship.

To Publish or to “Un-Publish” – That is the Question

 

A friend called yesterday after it was announced that Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography had been withdrawn from circulation although just recently published by WW Norton and Company.  Bailey is now accused of being a sexual predator.  In effect, the book is being declared out of print as a consequence of the accusation alone. My friend knows I am a former publisher and correctly thought I must have an opinion on the matter. He was right, although I’ve been away from the publishing scene for some twenty years now.

In full disclosure, I was a “fan” of Blake Bailey’s biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates (two of my favorite writers), and had praised them in this blog. 

In fact, I was hoping Bailey would be John Updike’s biographer, who, along with Roth, I considered to be the two most important writers of my generation.  But the son (Adam Begley) of another favorite writer (Louis Begley) had an inside track on that and as it turns out Adam Begley’s Updike biography measures up to the work Bailey has done.

So (to me) it was logical someone of Bailey’s stature in the literary biography world would be a leading candidate for Roth’s.  I do not know the ins and outs of how Norton, Roth, and Bailey got together, but I have grave doubts it is, as some have contended, one misogynist finding another, a marriage made in cancel culture heaven.

I have always purchased the hard cover editions of literary biographies of the writers most important to me, but because of the sheer size of the Roth biography, and the fact that I had hoped to read it on our travels after COVID shots set us free, I purchased the Kindle edition.  I now live in fear that Amazon will be forced to “withdraw” those already purchased and refund the $$, Norton making Amazon whole.  Could that be?  Seems Orwellian, but so do the past five years, no make it ten plus starting with the Tea Party and now culminating in the post Trump era with the anti-vaxxers vs. the vaxxers. 

I was primarily an academic publisher and as such we published books from all over the political spectrum.  If we had to run police records on all our authors, and I published more than 10,000 titles in my career, I’m sure we would have found some unsavory people on our list.  But no, provided the author documented his/her arguments, be they conservative or liberal on the political spectrum, we published the work.  We also published works on and/or by people who I would not want as a friend and I’m sure there were misogynists among them, but hopefully no axe murderers.  

I confess that we didn’t have to deal with the kind of high profile cases trade publishers do.  I never liked the business of “trade” meaning books that have potentially wide readership, sold in bookstores and now Amazon, and are sometimes published in large editions or subsequent editions, such as Roth’s biography.  Trade publishers, when publishing non-fiction, want to have a popular subject or writer as they have to compete not only with other books, but with media in general, everything demanding one’s time.  So, the more controversial the better! 

The trade publishing world is now considering cancelling planned publications of some of the people from the Trump administration.  I think it is fine for a trade publisher to take a political position, but thankfully there is always another one with the opposite position.  Imagine if the “me too” or the “cancel culture” was able to dictate not only what should be published in any form by any publisher or what books already in circulation should be declared out of print?   We’d probably lose a majority of the classics.  This is a symbolic form of book burning that only fascists might applaud.

No, there is only one answer to publishing these works in general:  it’s called the 1^st Amendment.  If someone chooses not to read the Roth biography as he/she neither likes the subject nor the author, don’t buy the book!  If it’s proven that Bailey is the monster he is accused of being, let the courts decide what to do with the royalties.

 

Evoking John Updike and Philip Roth

I woke up this morning and had John Updike and Philip Roth on my mind.  They are the writers I grew up admiring the most and I’ve made a point of that repeatedly in these pages.  So why am I now dreaming of them in the half light of dawn, both now gone?  The answer came as I was exercising in our pool this morning (one of the few pluses of being self quarantined in Florida): the pandemic of course.

I’ve discussed their attitudes towards death in past entries, almost as if being a dress rehearsal, and aren’t we all more acutely aware of our own fragile existence during these times? Roth’s preoccupation with death gathers momentum in his later works while Updike’s is less transparent, although Rabbit at Rest is fairly unambiguous, not to mention poems like “Perfection Wasted.”

Their demise leaves a void in serious American fiction.  Imagine what they would have to write today.  I mostly read fiction to understand our world, not to hear a “swell” story. There are other forms of entertainment for that.   Navigating COVID-19 without those heartfelt companions is almost like performing on a tight-rope without a net, such as the image from Delmore Schwartz’s “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me:” the “bear” (the body) “howls in his sleep because the tight-rope / trembles and shows the darkness beneath.”

This sudden longing for Updike and Roth made me curious about the progress Blake Bailey has made with the biography Roth authorized before his death, giving Bailey extensive interviews and documents.   Updike’s workman like biography was written by Adam Begley and published some six years ago.

But alas, after Googling the matter, Bailey (who I thought would write the Updike biography after writing magnificent ones of John Cheever and Richard Yates) is still working on the Roth biography and it is tentatively scheduled for publication in April 2021.  

 

However, there was an unexpected bonus in doing this research and that is coming across an absolutely breathtaking article by Charles McGrath who, as a former writer and editor for The New Yorker, knew both Philip Roth and John Updike.  His article, succinctly entitled “Roth/Updike” and published in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Hudson Review sheds a floodlight on their commonalities and clandestine competitiveness.  An abstract of this well written and impassioned article cannot do it justice, so here is a link.  Suffice it to say these two leading American writers will be remembered and studied for centuries to come.  No wonder they are on my mind.