Ross Barkan’s Glass Century

A Critique in 3 Parts

*My review of Glass Century turned into a “literary triptych,” in the form of three reviews: 1. About 30% of the way through; 2. About 50% of the way through; 3. 100% of the way through. It seemed best to just publish all three (edited for length, redundancy and clarity). I hope you enjoy, and by all means, even though I criticize the book a lot, it’s a book worth reading; so go buy it and review it on Amazon.

**Speaking of books on Amazon: Also consider buying, reading and reviewing my new short story collection, AMERICAN FREAKS. It includes previously published stories and stories published on Substack. I’m proud of this book.

Here’s a brief description of AMERICAN FREAKS: “In the vein of Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Jack Kerouac and Ottessa Moshfegh, Michael Mohr offers 21 gritty, raw, honest stories covering his drinking years (mostly) in the form of (mostly) autobiographical fiction which cover everything from hitchhiking across America to a clash with Hell’s Angels to being kidnapped during an alcoholic blackout in Mexico to shooting guns while high on LSD. Always searching for the deeper meaning in these sordid adventures, Mohr keeps you entertained, astonished and, often, shocked.”

BUY THE BOOK HERE OR CLICK ON COVER BELOW.

Here’s the Amazon summary of Ross Barkan’s novel, Glass Century: It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives.

The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man. After losing her city job in the 1970s fiscal crisis, Mona becomes a freelance news photographer for a radical new tabloid. When she beats the competition to capture a photo of a murderous vigilante taking the city by storm, she finds herself falling for a colleague-and Saul, now a rising star in government who is butting up against a young man named Donald Trump, fears he has lost her altogether. Years later, the affair not quite dead, Mona realizes she is pregnant with Saul's child.

Meanwhile, Saul's adult son, Tad, is traveling aimlessly across America, hunting for answers as the 1990s bleed into 9/11. Tad decides to take the darker path of the very vigilante Mona once exposed. And in the shadow of terrorism and war, Mona and Saul raise their son, Emmanuel, together-keeping their life a secret from Saul's wife and children. Spanning from the 1970s to the pandemic, this soaring, heartbreaking novel is a tour de force of ambition and grace, a great American chronicle that marks the emergence of a major new talent.

~

Everyone on Substack has been raving about Ross Barkan’s Glass Century. Well, someone’s got to play Devil’s Advocate. Someone’s got to be The Contrarian. Someone’s got to go against the tide of populist fervor.

To be clear: The 35-year-old Barkan is talented. Very talented, actually. The man can definitely write. No surprise there: He’s been a writer for various newspaper publications on and off for the past decade-plus. His lines on the sentence level are syntactically and dictionally (I think I just made this word up but I like it so I’m keeping it in) solid. Several books already under his belt, he doesn’t make the mistake, either, of doing what younger newly minted MFA grad students do, using $150 words for seemingly no reason, trying to mimic early Michael Chabon or a contemporary feminist-altered Joan Didion or (without their conscious knowledge) early Norman Mailer circa the 1950s. (Village Voice era.) Nor does he try to be Raymond-Carver-tight with his prose, and I appreciate that. He’s more Infinite Jest than Where I’m Calling From.

His lines are clear, simple and to the point; they beg, genuinely, for authentic literary communication. That’s all very much to the good. And he creates generally believable characters: The 24-year-old Mona Glass, an inchoate feminist Women’s Lib anti-Didion type who rails on capitalism and “the institution of marriage.” Or Saul, her older “fake” husband; the two characters did a fake wedding for the exclusive purpose of fooling her parents into believing she’s the good Jewish girl doing what she’s “supposed” to do and following the rules. Saul is a lawyer who works for the New York governor, “Rocky,” aka Rockefeller.

The voice works well; the inner tension and conflict is good—between Mona and herself around marriage, convention, feminism, freedom, love, autonomy; between Saul re his actual wife and two kids against his genuine love and surge towards the younger, freer Mona. The dialogue is pretty strong I’d say 85-90% of the time, especially with some classic scenes like the newspaper editor who hires Mona to take photos of dead people around the city.

But the problems, for me, already, are many.

For one there doesn’t seem to be much of a “plot” anywhere. Or, to say it more graciously: There is a general plot…but we don’t really know where we’re going or why. It’s more of an anecdotal character study of these young people in 1970s New York. When I say it feels “derivative,” this is largely what I mean: The writing, the story and the setting all feel, to me, as if they rose out of the primordial ooze—the gelatinous goo, perhaps—of every 20^th century classic our literarily-hungry [Millennial] generation grew up reading. It reads as very typical, cliché in that way, almost as if it’s a common novel which could have been written by almost any good writer over the past few decades.

I see whispers of Jonathan Franzen a la Freedom and The Corrections, and even some David Foster Wallace, not in his words—which, as I said are very simple and not acrobatic at all—but to some degree in the overall vibe and energy and tone of the writing, and the feeling one gets that Barkan thinks himself extremely smart, knowledgeable, wise and clever. This flew off the pages to me in a very obvious and off-putting way.

I also didn’t buy the setting. It didn’t feel like the decaying 1970s in New York to me, which is ironic given that Barkan was born and raised there. (Though born in 1989.) Instead, it felt like a caricature of an era. Despite the mentions of Nixon and “stagflation and “Women’s Lib” and some of the complex gender dynamics common at the time, it felt too obviously millennial to me still, with Mona’s “Woke” complaints about marriage and “capitalism.”

That, too, brought up another problem for me. Barkan wants us to know how much he knows about New York history. There is a serious case of “info-dumping,” as we writers and book editors (I am both) call it in the industry. He “dumps” information on readers all the time, at a pretty fast and thick clip, and often it doesn’t seem to have much or even any relevance to the story except for the fact that Barkan wants us to know that he knows a lot. He did research, and he lived in the city, damn it, and we’re going to know about it!

The ideology, too, screamed out at me. A quick Wikipedia check on Barkan showed me what I had suspected: Left a paper because they were soft on Trump; friends with AOC; classic contemporary Lefty. I understood that on the page. Like the info-dumping, he also makes it clear where his politics lie. I’ll grant him this: Props to Barkan for breaking from Progressive Orthodoxy and writing from a young woman’s POV. I liked that move. Mona herself felt largely if not entirely believable to me, not that I would necessarily know anyway, given that I, like Barkan, am a man.

But we clearly understand, as readers, that Barkan is a feminist, anti-capitalist, against the norms, mores and conventions of the male-dominated 1970s. All of this feels a little too predictable and easy. Not that the/a “plot” (which again, is hard to locate) is predictable (I don’t care as much about that if it’s done well) but the characters themselves are a little too predictable.

Add to all of this the fact (for me) that much of the novel so far feels sort of myopic, sort of limited, sort of cliché, sort of navel-gazing, and again one gets that smear of Millennialism which pulls one away from the gritty, more open-minded and complex era of the 70s, versus the homogenous era we live in now. In this respect the novel reminds me just a little of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which I actually liked surprisingly a lot more than I thought I would (read my review here), but which nevertheless falls into a cliché myopia as well which felt, to me, too common, too broad, too basic, as if partially written by AI. (But at least with Rooney the timeline is contemporary, ergo the Millennial thinking makes more sense.)

I’m also not sure I buy the plot-setup (if plot setup is the correct phrase here) of Mona and Saul pretending to get married in order to get Mona’s traditional Jewish parents off her back. Of course her folks expect them to buy a house or apartment, live together, have kids, none of which they plan to do; none of which Mona wants any part of (she thinks). It seems unrealistic to believe that a 24-year-old woman, mistake-bound as we all are at that age, would actually perform a fake marriage with a legally married man who has two kids and then pretend—for what, thirty, forty years?—to be married when in fact she is not. How, exactly, are they going to pull that off? It would be the stunt of the century if they could. It strikes me as pretty silly and illogical. Even if we grant Barkan a long leash with poetic license, it still seems far-fetched.

And so, for me, the novel just isn’t fundamentally working.

As an editor, I would have loved the chance to go in their with a machete and cut like a wild man, like a desperate barbarian whacking through thick South American jungle. Because probably there’s more here to find. And for the record I am going to keep reading. I’ll do a full book review when I’m done.

On the more praiseworthy side, some of the lines are fucking delicious. Here are some fun quotes:

1. “She was direct, so hard-charging, an arrow aimed at the future.”

2. “He could give her so much and so little, a part of him always in shadow.”

3. “Mona eyed the dress like she would a raccoon carcass in her wake.”

4. “She was direct, so hard-charging, an arrow aimed at the future.”

5. “The dress fell away like excess skin.”

Also, some of the scenes were really good. And entertaining. Especially when Fred Trump—yes, the Trumps are in the novel; what good 1970s NYC novel could ignore them—and his wayward, bratty son, Donald, walk into Saul’s office and talk about “tax abatements” for their real estate empire (Fred’s; mid-twenties Trump is learning). The dialogue, the tension, the expectations of Fred Trump versus what Saul thinks or could actually do for them, are intriguing.

Having myself dated a Jewish woman for four-and-a-half years in San Francisco, all of the Jewish backstory and context felt authentic. (Not that I’m either Jewish or an expert.) Here I also felt whispers—how could you not—of Philip Roth. The notion of the generation gap—between Mona and Saul, Baby Boomers, and their parents, Depression-era kids—works fairly well. Each generation rebels against the one that came before it: This is a mechanistic rule of nature and human history. Mona and Saul are of my parents’ Boomer generation. (I am 42.) The tension boils between tradition/convention and the new Women’s Lib movement, between capitalism and socialism, between the new young highly sexed and free generation and their Depression-era parents steeped in the old rules. And rules, as we know, are meant to be beautifully broken.

There’s a tennis scene which is brilliant, wherein Mona, a victim of harsh and casual sexism by a male tennis player, kicks the dude’s ass. This scene too made me think of the tennis-obsessed and linguistically acrobatic David Foster Wallace a la Infinite Jest. Barkan unrolls a brilliant tennis game scene and we’re with Mona every step of the way. (It’s a truly delicious scene.) You don’t need to be a tennis player to love it. We get into every move, every slight nuance of the game both physically and psychologically. (My father was a seasoned tennis player for a long time and both my parents watched games incessantly.) Barkan really shined in this chapter and my guess is that he has a personal history with tennis.

Like I said: All in all I’ll keep reading. But I have to be honest: Despite some of the flickers of raw talent and even moments of “brilliance” (or something close to it), the pace is often slow and I find myself starting to get distracted and, for lack of a better phrase, sometimes feel “bored.” Again, it’s not because of the lack of clear plot. It’s not because I need a quick, easy, fast read. I just reread—for the fourth time—Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a long Great Courses lecture series on the history of Europe from the fall of Rome to WWII, and am pushing through Czeslaw Milosz’s genius 1953 A Captive Mind now. All these are dense, slow books.

I have joyfully read long, slow books like Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and even books I mentioned like Franzen’s lengthy Freedom and The Corrections. But those books possess something crucial and fundamental which Glass Century, so far, lacks. (To be fair any writer, even a great one, can only dream of getting anywhere close to these literary masters. Still, in my view so far Barkan is too far away.) I think what works for these masters is: a mix of strong plot, deep characterization, a very authentic setting, and characters we can’t help but care about, whether we like them or not, as well as the deep, profound probing of the frail human condition, the universal search for meaning, the depth of what it means to be a complex human being interacting with other human beings.

Barkan’s characters are real in many ways. They’re somewhat interesting. But they feel too…common, like I said. Too ordinary and basic and 1.0 normal. Average might be the best word for them. But then, paradoxically, they do things that aren’t conventionally “normal” at all, such as performing a fake marriage to placate Mona’s parents. I understand that literature, of course, is to some extent trying to mimic reality, and the reality is, in part, that we humans are fairly boring, average, ordinary (even if most of us pretend we’re extraordinary, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment), but, still, there just isn’t that full connection yet, for me, between these characters and my caring/identifying as much as I’d like with/about them. I want something bigger, something deeper, something more complex and less simplistic in their lives, inner life, behavior and feelings. And, so far, I’m just not seeing that.

This happened with Intermezzo. My mind changing is still totally within the realm of possibility.

~

I am now over halfway through Ross Barkan’s Glass Century. I’m listening to it on Audible: The novel is 16-ish hours and I have under 7 hours left. I just got to chapter 3 of Part IV (Libra).

I still feel deeply conflicted about the novel. On one hand, I see (I think) what Barkan is trying to do. He’s trying to create a long, epic family saga spanning multiple eras and generations, moving from one POV to another, from parent to child, etc, showing us in the process the nature of family, age, generational disruption, familial secrets and cycles, genetics handed down, the essential nature of time, change, psychological evolution and devolution, etc.

But I think Barkan ultimately falls short of his goal.

I hate to say it but I can’t get away from that word: Derivative. It just feels too much like a mini-me (wannabe) Jonathan Franzen a la 2010’s brilliant family saga, Freedom. Or, less so, The Corrections. Both of these novels I’ve read and both are powerful tales of families through the generations. Both are more obsessed with deep, rich characterization than with conventional “plot.” They, after all, those rare novels of our time: Serious literary novels (“literature”) which also happen to be popular bestsellers easy for the general masses to read.

And it’s not just Franzen, of course. I think of another brilliant family saga novel, East of Eden by John Steinbeck. There are plenty of these books, of course. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky might even factor in here, even if there isn’t as much backstory and generational change as we see in Franzen.

But the problem is Barkan, in my opinion, doesn’t pull it off. Like Franzen the plot is very much subservient to the characters and the passing of time. But whereas Franzen somehow—amazingly—sustained my interest for all 600-plus pages of both his famous books, with Barkan’s 484-page ode I keep finding myself, frankly, distracted, bored.

For example, chapters one and two of Part IV (“Libra”). These two chapters, just as a random example, felt so incredibly navel-gazing and anecdotal that a small but persistent voice in the back of my head kept gratingly whispering, Blah blah blah, Yeah yeah yeah: So What? That sounds mean but it’s just how I felt. We see Emmanuel—Mona and Saul’s kid—punched in the nose by a bully at school. (He’s 5.) We see Mona meet her best friend Liv’s new man. (A rich pompous asshole.) We go into Saul’s head as he drives to pick up Emmanuel from school after the punching, Saul recollecting his own childhood, his shitty parents, the differences in parenting then versus now.

And look: I get it. I see what Barkan is doing. I don’t require a strong, compelling action scene in every single chapter. (Though frankly that would be nice.) But give us something! Anything! These two chapters in particular just felt superficial, hollow, anecdotal, and increasingly slow and random. A piercing question poked its way up from my acidic gut: Where are we going? And then a sub-question: And why should I care?

Because that’s another question I had: Who is this book for? Ross Barkan? Because it doesn’t exactly feel to me like it’s for The Readers. Barkan wants to info-dump about baseball and government and politics and journalism—all things he clearly knows intimately in real life, literally or through research and books—but I don’t feel like he’s necessarily including us in the ride.

Also, sometimes the plot is a “deux ex machina.” Mona and Al—when in their twenties working for the paper trying to find the violent madman, “Vengeance,” in NYC while in action, harming someone innocent—are discussing the mystery anti-hero when BAM, suddenly they hear a sound down in the subway (they’re in the car together near a station late at night, no one else around) and they go and there he is, Vengeance, getting crazy on some young man. Mona, of course, gets the crucial photo and becomes regionally famous. This felt highly implausible.

Oftentimes the action seems to work for “the plot” of the novel (whatever that “plot” exactly is…we’re never precisely sure), but not for the realism of the novel feeling authentic and truly believable. Mona and Saul doing a fake wedding when he’s already legally married and has two kids and she knows her old-school Jewish parents will expect them to live together, have kids, buy a home, and for her to change her name, none of which she plans on doing. I just didn’t buy this weak plot point. It doesn’t make sense.

Barkan reminds me a little of the writer Emma Cline, a young woman who became a huge literary sensation circa 2016 (at the age then of about 25 or 27) when she published her first novel, fresh out of her MFA program, The Girls, a fantastic, half-genius novel about the Manson girls told from the POV of the youngest Manson girl, who’s 14.

Like with Glass Century, I had mixed feelings about The Girls. These two books as far as writing style and content couldn’t be more different. Cline is a consummate literary stylist in the vein of say Susan Sontag. (Aka: Lots of big shiny $100 words, long flowery sentences, pretentious overwriting but also often steeped with dark beauty, depth and incredible raw talent.)

So in this regard Cline and Barkan are opposites.

But their books are similar, to me, in this way: They both have smears of great talent, and they both swing hard for something which is that they want to further the literary conversation around the fine writers of the mid- and later 20^th century and early 21^st. They want to be modern-day Didions and Franzens. Mini-me writers. The problem, again, for me, is that they don’t succeed. (But Barkan got quotes for Glass Century from writers like Adelle Waldman, Junot Diaz and Jill Hoffman, among others.)

Both writers are seriously talented and have big, expansive minds. But I also felt like they were sort of like 21^st century “Jackson Pollack” novels: They kind of just splatter the canvas with everything they’ve got. In some places, brilliance. In many other spots, boredom, meaninglessness, randomness, anecdote, navel-gazing, derivative copy-cat writing. With Cline it made more sense to me: She was 25 or 27, it was her very first novel. But Barkan, 35 and with a few books already behind him, flummoxes me a little more.

Again, as I already said clearly (I hope): I get very much where he’s coming from, where he’s theoretically trying to go. I can even visualize the figurative literary road he’s driving down under a dome of clear blue sky and puffy white clouds. I just don’t think he’s on the right road. I think he should have taken a right when he instead took a left. Having read a few chunks of interviews with him, I wonder if one reason might be his over-confidence.

And look, I want to like Glass Century. Because I appreciate men writing books right now in a female-dominated publishing landscape (though the novel is published by a small indie publisher and mostly can’t be found in bookstores). And because Barkan’s literary heroes—Franzen, DeLillo, Wallace—are writers I genuinely also admire. I guess at the end of the day I just wish the novel were more unique to Barken, more original and independent, standing more on its own two unique, new, fresh legs than on the legs of authors who came before, and not long ago. All writers, of course, borrow, steal and even to some extent copy or mimic the greats who came before. But usually you don’t notice the similarities so glaringly. It’s like seeing a film in which good actors are so talented that you can’t tell they’re acting, versus a less-than-stellar or less-than-professional indie film where you CAN tell they’re acting. There’s a massive chasm between these two.

And as talented as Barkan is—and he is!—I feel like I can see the seams of Franzen too much, as if he is “acting” in a fairly obvious way, and, for me, this damages the novel. Add in the slow, extraneous material, the navel-gazing non-plot anecdote, the incessant free-floating interiority, and it just begins to sag. As a developmental book editor I found myself wishing the book were perhaps half its length.

~

Well, this concludes my Ross Barkan Glass Century triptych book review: I finished the novel.

This is me sighing, loud and long.

The novel was only 484 pages—I often read books twice as long—but it FELT like it was 1,400 pages in some ways.

That’s not to say I thought the novel was “bad.” Truthfully, I felt mixed about the book in the end. Certainly I still feel the same as I said earlier about Barkan reading, to me, like a wannabe Franzen Mini-Me. And this overall didn’t work for me. The novel also reminded me of the novel Hello, Beautiful by the writer Ann Napolitano. And yes, now I can see the traces of Don DeLillo. But, again, it all had a derivative feel to me. Perhaps Barkan wants to be the 21^st century Thomas Pynchon a la Gravity’s Rainbow, a sort of less verbose, less flashy contemporary David Foster Wallace with a Franzen fetish. Something like that.

Still—all that aside—Barkan is a damn fine writer; the 35-year-old is brimming with raw talent. There’s just no question about that. And if he doesn’t quite make the mark, in my opinion, of either being a “great” writer or of creating a “great novel,” then the flip side of that is this: He has concocted a very authentic-feeling (at times) and based-on-real-life-for-most-humans (at times) kind of experience. It’s literature, for sure. People have referred to Barkan regarding this novel as a “major new voice” and I can’t say I totally disagree. Though I didn’t like the novel nearly as much as I hoped I would—or, as it were, so many others seemed to—I did see the merit and skill and breadth of it as some kind of genuine achievement. I myself probably could not have written a novel like this.

Funny, Kirkus gave Barkan a lukewarm review (ditto my own novel, The Crew) and said the 9/11 part was “predictable.” Well, it WAS predictable…but for me that didn’t matter. Actually, in my view the 9/11 chapters (two of them) were probably the strongest of the whole book. For someone who must have been by my math about 10-12 years old when the towers came down (I was 18), he sure did create a compelling, action-filled, eminently readable and suspenseful, entertaining couple chapters. He captured what must have been the raw terror, the totalizing fear of that day, the confusion, the fear of it being war waged on U.S. soil. It felt very genuine to me. It was probably the fastest-paced section of the novel.

Barkan in the end did a good job bopping around from character POV to character POV, from Tad (Saul’s wayward son with Felicia, the character I probably relate most to pre-sobriety, a guy who takes off on his own, says fuck it to college, and drifts around America) to Mona Glass to Saul Plotz to Emmanuel (Saul and Mona’s secret illegitimate child), etc. (Another Franzen move a la Freedom and The Corrections.)

Glass Century is a sprawling epic covering from the 1970s to the 2020 pandemic in NYC. (Barkan also captured COVID in NYC very well; I would know: I was there: Read my memoir about my experience here.) The novel has many core themes but the most crucial one seems to be how people change (or remain the same in some ways) over time. How we have only one life to life, and therefore one set of choices in which to make. How does the past come back to haunt us? How do choices we made as young people affect us deeply later on in life? What genetic and familial traits (psychologically, emotionally, physically) do we inadvertently hand down to our kids, the next generation? And it’s about that, too: The clash of generations. We shift from Saul and Mona (Boomers) to their kids (Millennials).

The problem for me was that Saul and Mona didn’t really seem to change much at ALL, from when they were “together” (in a complicated and non-legal way) in the 1970s all the way into the early 2000s. Only during COVID do things change and that’s only because Felicia (Saul’s legal, actual wife) finally leaves him. But this lack of change was a little hard to believe. True, some people stay much the same over long periods of time…but these characters REALLY stayed the same. Same sexual and romantic dynamic between them. Saul has the same wife. They think, talk and act the same, more or less. Mona still kills at tennis at 50 the way she did at 25. Saul does the same kind of work for the same kind of people. They have the same sexual spark and affair arrangement, all done in secret. (So they think.)

In other words, for me, it felt like it “worked” technically for “the plot,” but it didn’t feel realistic to me. And that jarred me from the narrative.

But that was a kind of running theme in Glass Century

Mona and Al suddenly hearing Vengeance one night while discussing it in the car felt unrealistic. Mona and Saul not changing at all over the course of 20, 30 years felt unrealistic. Tad becoming the next Vengeance a la Mr. Chu felt unrealistic. Mr. Chu—the Asian man Tad delivers food for in Queens—spoke unrealistically, like a mythic Don Juan/Jesus Christ. There were lots of areas which felt unrealistic and unlikely to me, that yanked me away from the novel’s talent.

Too much info-dump all the way through: about baseball, journalism, politics, NYC history, Marval comics. In fact I felt towards the midway point that perhaps Barkan has read too many Marval comics because his book sort of reads like one, with Vengeance the heroic anti-hero. And maybe that’s even his fun, satiric goal. For me it didn’t work; it just felt silly and unlikely. A contemporary Batman, Superman, etc. Fairytale stuff.

So the plot-lessness, the info-dump, the unreality, the overly mythic/shamanic dialogue sometimes, the sometimes overly autobiographical feel (I don’t know if there’s a lot of autobiography in Glass Century but certain parts sure felt like it), the Franzen copy-and-paste style and POV-hopping, the attempt to create this sprawling, DeLillo-like NYC universe on the page: All of this brought down the literary “score” (to be crude) of the novel for me. In the end, I’d give Glass Century maybe a 7.3/10. With editing out 130-180 pages, reworking some of the slippery and unbelievable plot points, rewriting some of the unrealistic dialogue, and trimming everything down, I’d probably have landed at something more like 9/10. (10/10 is Dostoevsky, pretty much unattainable for any of us.)

But it’s a damn strong effort, a serious piece of work, and, as mentioned before, Barkan IS a new voice and force to be reckoned with in contemporary American letters.

I think Barkan needs to go back to the drawing board and write a more original novel. Something less pulled from the greats of the 2010s and 1990s and more from his own heart, soul and literary blood. I do appreciate the fact that, as a Millennial (of which generation I also belong; I am seven years older than Barkan) Barkan did something somewhat similar to David Foster Wallace in 1996 with Infinite Jest: He wants his own and the younger American generations to be forced to WORK again in their reading, instead of being given easy prose in 200, 250 pages which is what we most often see nowadays with contemporary novels because readers’ attention spans are ever narrowing.

While I respect this I also see it’s inherent flaws (hence the editing comment). But I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.

I also liked the fact that the novel is not “politically correct.” In other words: The characters engage in real life behavior: Male sexism and women wanting to get married and have kids but feeling conflicted in the 1970s; kids in the 1990s casually firing off the word “faggot”; etc. And the characters do have rich inner lives, deep complex characterization; they don’t feel one-dimensional or rigid and fake. They have conflicting inner worlds, full of contradictions and hypocritical nuances, like real life human beings. There was a depth and sincere grappling with the human condition, human frailty and the human experience in this novel, even if not as much as I’d wanted. Barkan makes a serious grasp for glory. He doesn’t grip the object of his grasp; like I said I think in the end the novel ultimately fails. And yet: He does make a serious reach for it.

When facing new pages each morning—listening, I should say: I listened via Audible—I often felt a mix of dread and excitement mixed with hope. Dread because I knew the prose was going to drag on and feel slow and boring for large chunks and it would feel syrupy, anecdotal and plotless. Excitement because towards the second half I knew also that I was fairly locked into caring about the main characters and that at some point there’d be plot points which did make sense and which did really move the story and which I did really enjoy and appreciate. And then hope because I always thought that this time, maybe just maybe, things would move a little faster, be a little more entertaining, that the story would shine just as brightly as the abstract themes and ideas Barkan clearly wanted us to swallow and digest.

I think people will be talking about this novel for a good while. And they should. Barkan clearly put a lot of work into it. It was a COVID novel, actually, which he wrote—or started writing—during COVID in 2020. Not bad for a pandemic literary baby. The guy can write, sometimes gorgeously, almost always fluently in a literary style which, if Franzen-esque, also has some original streaks of Barkan-ism.

So, to Ross Barkan I say: Congrats on the novel; thanks for swinging the bat hard and fast; you got out (for me) at third base; but boy did I wonder at first if that ball just might swing over the fence.