Political Currents is the highly subscribed New York politics newsletter where readers these days are most likely to encounter Ross Barkan, if not in the New York Times Magazine, the New Statesman, or the host of other periodicals to which he is a frequent contributor. Written from the Left, the newsletter appeals not to the partisan, but instead has a gritty feel for the flow of power in the city and state that have refined politics into a Machiavellian art.
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What readers of Barkan’s political writing might not know, though he has been dropping hints for some time, is that Barkan is also a novelist. With Glass Century, his third and most high-profile novel to date, he makes a bid to be known as a novelist first and foremost. An ambitious and impressive work, it pulses with the same spirit as his reporting, yet reveals ever greater human and imaginative depth.
The story begins in the 1970s and ends in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It centers on Mona Glass, a local tennis star and Brooklyn-born child of middle-class Jews, and Saul Plotz, a trained lawyer and Marxist former political science lecturer now working as Queens borough director for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal Republican. The day the insouciant, liberated Mona walks into Saul’s City College classroom is the day they each meet their true loves. No fairytale, theirs is a solid, prosaic romance, ordinary enough in its modern way, were it not for one inconvenient fact: Saul, a decade older, is already married, with a son and daughter on Long Island.
The opening chapters find the lovers embroiled in the subterfuge — a fake marriage ceremony, designed to put Mona’s parents off the scent — that launches them on their express train’s parallel track: the double of normal life, but only making selected stops. No buying a house. No moving in together. No ring, except when Mona’s parents are visiting, and each remembers. Though just when Mona’s age has made precautions no longer seem necessary, there will eventually be a child.
Their strangely linked lives are intertwined with that of their city. When Mona’s job at City Hall is a casualty of layoffs, she accepts an invitation from her friend Al Falcone to tag along as a crime-scene photographer for the Daily Raider, an up-and-coming police blotter. It is the height of the 1970s crime wave, and business is booming. Though Al, an aspiring painter, brings an artist’s sensibility to his work, it is the dogged Mona who makes her name by photographing “Vengeance,” a masked vigilante who has been taunting the police and public with acts of spectacular violence. When this mysterious figure calls her at the office, she lands a second windfall in the form of an exclusive interview. The queen of the hardcourts has become a tabloid legend.
However, time lets no one rest on their laurels. While Saul plugs away at his parallel lives, Mona raises their son Emmanuel in Bay Ridge. Lured by the regular hours and higher pay (the better to cover private school tuition), Mona eventually abandons the crime desk to cover politics for the Daily News. Meanwhile, her old friend Liv (Al’s ex) bags the job of a lifetime: managing Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center’s north tower. In this crystal palace, Liv meets her own beau, Grayson Moegenborg, scion of New York’s aristocracy, who introduces her to the world of penthouse glamor. From these delirious heights, we get our first intimation that history and the “glass century” will collide.
“Counter-life” and “counter-realities” are the novel’s terms for its characters’ strangely luminous shadow existences. But if the former term echoes Philip Roth, a better clue to the novel’s lineage comes in the epigraph from John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, a paean to the “steel, glass, tile, concrete” of the city’s “million-windowed buildings.” However, I was more immediately reminded of that same author’s U.S.A. Trilogy, which Glass Century echoes in its mixture of interest in ordinary life and relentless momentum as it hurls its characters into the future.
Glass Century’s defining ethic is the hustle. Barkan is a writer of unparalleled hustle, and it is not hard to see embodiments of this ethos in Mona and, a generation later, in Saul’s estranged son Tad, who ekes out a marginal existence as a bike courier for a Chinese restaurateur he comes to revere as a footsoldier does a beloved general. Like its characters, the book wagers on rhythm, on a cumulative effect that sweeps aside petty cavils. An awkward wording here or anachronistic locution there merely reminds you that the book is after a different game than a pristine finish. Striking coincidences, including a late twist on the vigilante plot that anticipates Mangione madness, flaunt indifference to the good taste and regularity of texture that have left the contemporary novel so often an antiseptic, risk-averse affair.
Again and again, the book returns to a few primal virtues: persistence and courage, love and risk over safety and rest. After so many critiques of the society of the spectacle, it is striking to find Barkan associate the tabloid trade not just with fantasy and flash, but with the reality of blood. This insight may owe something to the novel’s post-internet vantage point, but is no less true for that. Mona and the mysteriously kindred Tad, with whom she shares not blood but Saul, risk themselves to deliver what others will consume. Tapping into the city’s veins, they live by pushing themselves further and faster, as if exertions could only strengthen them, and depletions only harden — as, for a time, they can.
There is a poetic impulse here that goes beyond obvious ironies. Liv feels that the twin towers “had talismanic powers to protect those who worked there,” and the novel’s strangest quality leaves us uncertain if we ought to discount this. On the deepest level, Barkan retains that sense, inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane, that illusions are true, in their way, and can never finally be dispelled. What is most true, in this most American of novels, is not beginnings or endings, but what keeps everything in between in motion.
Paul Franz’s reviews and poems appear in various publications. His newsletter is ashesandsparks.substack.com.