On Glass Century

The Contemporary Historical Novel

Hello friends—

I did an interview over at Republic of Letters.

Brandon Taylor Answers All Possible Questions

First, a disclaimer: This is not a takedown. Nor is it a fellating. If you are interested in either of those things for parasocial reasons, I suggest you direct your attention elsewhere. Also, thank you to Ross for a PDF so I could check the quotes. TYSM.

For the last month or so, I have been reading Ross Barkan’s Glass Century (2025, Tough Poets Press). When I started the novel, I texted a friend and said, “I am listening to Ross Barkan’s book. Jonathan Franzen must pay for his crimes.” I bought the audiobook (with my own American money, not even an Audible credit) because I am spending the summer in Europe and books are heavy. The days in Florence have been hot and long. Twice a week, I teach for NYU in a little classroom nestled high in the hills. After class, I walk to my apartment in Le Cure, along an extremely narrow strip of sidewalk that runs alongside Via del Bolognese. There are no taxis in that part of town nor in Le Cure, so the only way to get home is the thirty-seven minute walk under a bright, piercing sun from which there is no escape. You might think that this would make for inhospitable conditions under which to listen to an audiobook, but you would be wrong. I listen to Glass Century as I walk from work. I listen to Glass Century as I walk up that same long stretch of dangerous road going to work. I listen to Glass Century as I shop at Carrefour. I listen to Glass Century as I take the bus to the Casa della Stilografica and browse pens. I listen to Glass Century as I walk to the square and browse notebooks and run my hands along the leather hanging up in the backs of the stationery store. I listened to Glass Century in the airport for a recent flight to London. I listened to it on the Elizabeth Line. On the 390 bus. On my way home from dinner, walking all the way from King’s Cross to St. Giles. I listened to Glass Century as I walked along St. Pancras eating ice cream. I listened to Glass Century as I browsed at Foyles and later made an emergency stop at Muji before returning to the provincial backwater of Florence. I listened to it at the airport on my return trip home. All I have done for the last month is listen to Glass Century and read PDFs about Sebald, Bernhard, post-realism, and the historiography of the contemporary. It is the only fiction, in fact, that I have read for the last month apart from the short stories I teach my students on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In London, I had this strange feeling, standing at a pedestrian crossing on Oxford Street, of looking up at a building and for a moment forgetting where I was because I had been living inside of Glass Century, which was to say that the book had created an atmosphere and a mood so continuous with my experience of waking life that for that brief moment, I experienced a breakdown in the barrier between my life and the events of the novel. It was only a moment, just a moment, but it was so strange, so intense, that I almost swooned. I think regardless of whatever else I have to say about the book, it’s important to acknowledge that the experience of reading it for a month straight did transport me however fleetingly, and that is no small thing.

Glass Century opens in 1973 and runs up to the pandemic, a span of almost fifty years. The novel focuses on Mona Glass, in her early twenties at the start of the novel, and her older lover, Saul Plotz. To get Mona’s parents off her back, she and Saul stage a fake wedding. Fake because Mona has no desire to marry anyone ever and because Saul is already very married. At the start of the novel, they have been carrying on an affair for five years, aided by the fact that Saul’s wife, the extremely conventional Felicia, rarely comes to Manhattan and never to Brooklyn, where Mona and her Jewish parents live. That this affair could only happen in New York (or maybe New Jersey, depending, well, actually, let’s just say the Tri-State, to be safe) is one of the virtues of Glass Century. That’s not to say that long-term mistresses and second families are native only to New York or the tri-state, but it is to say that Mona and Saul’s relationship feels distinct to this era of social life in New York with its cross-currents of religion, class, and social mores. That Mona and Saul are Jewish matters to the way their relationship plays out and to the central deception they perpetrate on Mona’s parents. So much of Saul and Mona’s understanding of their relationship, yes, but also the world and history arises sharply from the fact that they are the children of diasporic Jews though from distinctly different classes having to do with when and how they came to America. You feel somehow that it matters how they were raised, how they grew up.

Anyway, Saul and Mona pretend to get married, and then the novel is more or less off to the races as it gallops across a fifty-year streak of history in New York. There are proper nouns, names, landmarks, events, and the like. Buildings go up. They come down. The Trumps appear, including Donald in one memorable and funny scene. Saul works in politics, which allows Barkan to smuggle in references from the heights of power. Mona eventually becomes a photojournalist and crawls around the city’s dark underside, snapping photos of vigilantes and murders and gruesome crimes. With Mona stationed as the novel’s eyes on the ground through whom we perceive the city’s churn of criminality and the pressures squeezing the middle class, and with Saul perched up top to beam insight into the nature of ordinances and the inner workings of capitalism, the novel covers all of the acceptably liberal observations about New York as a social and political entity as experienced by white Jews as they slid from the midcentury into the contemporary moment.

Here, I believe, we see what has become of the social-historical novel after the golden bowl broke, so to speak, with the dissolution of all the old coherent myths. The historical novel survives into the contemporary moment much reduced in scale and altered in its aim. Rather than serving to illustrate the development of the social process through character conflict, where the characters themselves serve as emanations of distinct social forces (the revolutionary spirit vs conservatism, for example), the contemporary historical novel is more akin to a chamber drama whose elucidations are merely descriptive. At least in the case of Glass Century, where there is no demonstrable evolution in the social process through the characters or their conflicts. Rather, history is a thing that happens to them with the strangeness and randomness of weather. The reader recognizes history solely through the recognition of certain brand names that pass over them. The novel feels rather more like a birding expedition than a true explication or exploration of the social forces at work in New York over this fifty-year span. There is also the fact that the characters represent a narrow sliver of the total social fabric of New York. The novel is chiefly focalized through Mona and Saul. There is the addition of Saul and Mona’s son Emmanuel. And there is also Saul’s son Tad who get their own chapters interspersed throughout. In that way, it’s a family novel, a semi-multi-generational family saga, that other great populist form of the 21^st century which I’ve come to regard as an apologetic form. A distinctly American attempt to make up for the lack of history’s presence in our fiction. Or perhaps the multi-generational family saga itself serves as a domestication of history, or the subjectivizing of history. Still, I recognize in Glass Century certain motivations of the Historical Novel as a genre. Its scale, yes. The illustration and dramatization of real events. The representation of real people. And its focus on the “middling” or ordinary people of the era who find themselves giving rise to the social-cultural forces of their time. But to me, this is where Glass Century represents a pivot in the Historical Novel. Because the characters’ passivity betrays a very contemporary mode of historical understanding. And also, they don’t illustrate any of the social process. Instead, it unfolds around them and they note it from time to time. I think the project of Glass Century and perhaps the project of any social-historical novel of the contemporary moment is divergent from the previous mode of the Historical Novel in this aspect. No one does anything. No one brings about anything. All of the interpersonal drama stays interpersonal or intrafamilial. For all of the wonderful texture of Mona and Saul’s background, their trenchant observations about their family histories and the habits of older Jews, it all feels rather inert, like background.

I suppose the short version of what I mean is that the primary action of Glass Century is domestic. People get jobs. They lose jobs. They play tennis. They walk around. They have sex. They do not divorce. They go to baseball games. They take meetings. They are stuck and stalled. Perhaps what Barkan means to tell us is that so much of our contemporary moment and its ills stem from this overwhelming passivity, and that the emotional, familial, and spiritual stagnation experienced by Mona and Saul and their children and friends is the reason for the economic, social, and spiritual stagnation that came to dominate New York until it was replaced with rampant, violent paranoia after 9/11. Which, okay, but also, did it feel so passive to the black people of that time? To the women who were actually women’s libbers? It seems somehow to me that part of the narrative put forward by Glass Century only holds if you accept the social narrowness of the contemporary historical novel. The passive determinism of this book feels more like a millennial’s understanding of history. But that might just be me.

I’m afraid I’m making the novel sound very bad. When I texted my friend to say that I was reading the book, she asked me if it was bad. I told her then that I didn’t know if bad was the word. It was more that the book felt quite artificial to me in its presentation. Part of that is because Barkan was writing the book in a very…let’s say written way. Or in a style and mode that emphasized the writtenness of it. He did not seem particularly interested in disappearing into his characters’ experiences of either their bodies or their thoughts. The “dominant” contemporary fictional mode is one of transparency either through the use of first-person narration or free indirect discourse. The goal ultimately is to convince the reader that there is no narrator, no mediating presence, only pure story conveyed through a series of scenes or through an emotional atmosphere. Barkan writes like Theodore Dreiser doing a Jonathan Franzen impression. He never vanishes. There was this one line that I sent to my friend:

She was naked now, she realized. He began sliding his underwear off.

What’s so wrong with that, you might ask. A perfectly serviceable sentence. And it is. But it’s the sort of thing that draws attention its written quality. Because if one had wanted to convey the experience of being naked alongside one’s lover, then, I mean, you probably wouldn’t write it that way. That she realized is so loud, also. But that’s his way. That’s his style. And if you have been reading a lot of fiction in the other fictional mode—transparent writing, free indirect, first-person, etc.—then its artificiality will be jarring. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s down to taste.

But where I think the novel occasionally (or often, depending on how you feel about this sort of thing) gets itself into trouble is when you can feel Barkan overriding the register of his chosen focalizing character. First, let me explain what I mean. In third-person fiction, the author (via the narrator) sometimes filters the story or scene through a particular character’s experience. This is called focalizing. Granting one character’s consciousness primacy in the narration. Usually, in the contemporary way of writing, the focalization feels more or less commensurate with the voice, tone, style, and register of the chosen character. The same scene will have different presentations depending on the chosen focalizer. If you convey the scene focalized through a fisherman, it might feel different than that same scene focalized through a professor. Sometimes authors make use of this assumption and play with our perceptions to wonderful effect. In the case of Glass Century, particularly in the case of Mona Glass, the narration sometimes overruns her and the book seems to speak with an extremely literary erudition and understanding. The thing about Mona Glass is that she is a jock. I don’t know if she reads a book in the entire novel. Her intellectual atmosphere is dominated by tennis and her friendships. You don’t have the sense that she is…a figurative person. Yet, we are often treated to long strings of literary metaphor as her primary means of understanding the economy, for example. Or social political history. In these moments, it feels like Ross Barkan is writing some very incisive social commentary or turning out wonderful phrases that have absolutely nothing to do with Mona Glass’s interiority:

She counted fifty-two resumes dropped off or mailed out. Two interviews, one at the Board of Education, the other for a social worker position with a nonprofit that paid $4,000 less than what she earned with the city. Both interviews were without obvious stumbles or gaffes, her performance rated as adequate to mildly exemplary in her own mind, each ending in such a way—a firm handshake and a smile—that could have connoted a job offer. But what she was finding out was that this year was going to be worse than the last and the following year could very well be even worse. The economy, that impenetrable, billion-eyed beast drooling the manna that fed and clothed all living things, was ailing. Depression, a word that haunted her parents, was whispered, as was its indolent cousin, recession, which Mona learned simply meant negative growth in consecutive quarters. Stagflation was a new one, stagnating wages conjoined to inflation, your capital withering in your pockets. She could feel herself stagflating in real-time, her bedroom constricting, the snow- flakes beyond the windowpane disappearing against the glass like the dollars in her bank account. It was February.

Despite the fineness of the sentences in some of these passages, I was left thinking, Where is this coming from? Does this lady even read? What’s going on? That isn’t to say that only people who read have recourse to figurative language or beautiful language. Or access to beauty. I don’t think at all. My grandfather was an illiterate farmer, and he taught me more of poetry and beauty than any professor I’ve ever had. He had an extremely poetic and figurative understanding of life and the world. But when he talked, his idiom was, well, his idiom made sense to him. Let me give you an example.

As a kid, I was afraid of chickens. Like, very. We had a lot of chickens. Anyway, one time I got locked in the chicken fence and dropped a cup of feed and they swarmed me and I cried and almost wet myself and ran to him. And he said to me, “What you fraid of? What made you made them, didn’t it?” What made you made them. Like. Wow. Anyway, sometimes, when Barkan is focalizing through Mona, the writing gets very…literary, let’s say. But it feels discordant and discontinuous with her mode of expression. Part of this is because, again, the sections that feel most like Mona are the sections where she’s playing tennis. Where her interiority is revealed to be rather simple and perhaps naïve, but fierce. Direct. Now, again, just because you focalize through a character doesn’t mean the narrator is stuck in that person’s voice in some exact way. We all know that you get a little leeway, but I think Glass Century violates this rule in pursuit of elegant expression. And that to me feels, always, bad.

I have more to say, actually, about the presentation of this novel. The characters talk in stories and symbols. Sometimes, in the middle of a mundane conversation, they will offer a perfectly synopsized articulation of the moment. I often longed for them to just talk like people. Or for the novel to present them as moving through their lives without pausing every five paragraphs to explain the moment to me.

After Mona is mugged, in lieu of rage or the inarticulacy of fear for the woman he loves, we get a disquisition on citizenship from Saul:

In front of Mona, he had been ready to slander New York City. Why? He was sounding just like Felicia. Like every taxpayer gnawing on stale rolls at another Roslyn civic association meeting. He believed in this place after all, he had to, even from afar. Even if it gave him new reasons to anticipate its destruction. Mona was mugged. The fiscal picture, like the crime rate, was not good. The bond market was weak. The rich assholes, with their precious tax and investment dollars, were speculating elsewhere, trying to stake new frontiers in swamps and deserts, all these swelling cita- dels of resentment in Florida and Arizona and wherever the hell else people went to die in air-conditioning. He was a patriot of the city, now an expatriate, entombed in lily-white affluence.

Then there’s this moment when Mona’s (admittedly pretentious) brother-in-law uncorks this dreary string:

“I sense we’re at the end of a century that saw tremendous progress and bloodshed, and in the next century, progress will overtake bloodshed.”

This adds to the sensation of artifice. Not to be all in the before time about this, but one of the potent aspects of the Historical Novel is that it renders History as the material and spiritual conditions through which the characters are living. They don’t know that they are in history. History arises out of their actions which are a response or result of the given conditions of their lives. In Glass Century, I often felt like I was watching a period drama, where the characters know they are on a show. I guess, it’s like going to a bad play. Where the people talk and act like they know they’re being watched. At its best, the novel forgets that it is a historical novel or trying to be one or trying to be a novel at all. At its worst, the novel announces itself with a screeching insistence.

There’s this one conversation between Tad (Saul’s son) and the guy who owns the Chinese restaurant he runs deliveries for. They’re talking about Vengeance, a vigilante stalking the criminals of New York City. And, Chiu keeps talking in symbolism and summarized knowledge. Rather than conveying to Tad the direct, first-hand experience of what he lived through. It felt more like exposition in dialogue form:

“Do you remember Vengeance?” he asked Chiu the following Friday.

“The vigilante.”

“Yes.”

“I remember there was a time when it felt like only mystical beings from the shadows could save us. I will tell you that I’ve been in America since I was a boy. But it is Americans who can grow most alienated from their country. Immigrants have a devotion to the ideal. The myth will always carry meaning. They came here, there- fore they cannot be disappointed. To reject America is to reject yourself—the decisions you made, what your essence became.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“Vengeance arrived at a very specific point in history and many, silently, cheered him on. I was well into my thirties, my financial station secure. We tasted anarchy and saw him as an agent against it.”

So much of the book is like this. Primary experience gets dressed up as explications of The Time. It’s as if the book wants you to know that these things have significance. Which, weirdly enough, robs them of significance because the primary emphasis is on the symbolic rather than the immediacy or urgency of the characters’ primary experiences.

The other way that this manifests in the presentation of the novel is that sometimes you are in a scene and then Barkan will step back to explain at great length how the character came to be there. Just interrupting a conversation or an important moment to deliver backstory. Now, I love backstory. I truly do. But there is a time and a place. And often, the delivery here felt…well, it felt…dense? It interceded where one might have expected the present scene to unfold or convey something important.

There are exceptions. There is a wonderful chapter about Mona’s tennis. This is some of the best tennis writing I have ever read. It combines the social, the psychological, the physical. It is astonishing in part also because it captures a moment where something changes, alters, irrevocably in the social texture of this park where they play tennis. Mona, a woman, challenges this asshole guy to play tennis and over the course of this match, she wins. But Barkan links the match up with the Battle of the Sexes that had occurred a little before this moment, and also with the social and gender norms of New York at that time. Her triumph is incredible because it feels totally authentic to the direct circumstances of the moment. Like, she is like, Bro, fuck you, fight me, and she wins! Totally in character for her. But also it tells us something particular about gender and sex norms and tennis and it does it all at once, together, through primary experience, and what Mona makes of it feels totally in line with her voice and her understanding of the world. It is rendered not in Barkan’s kind of Authorial Intrusion, but in Mona Glass’s fucking voice. It’s amazing. Totally amazing. Right down to the park people taking bets and hoping the guy would lose because he’s been such an asshole to them all this whole time! What’s also so effective about this section is that it Barkan cedes it enough space to unfold and to capture a total social reality in one incident, one moment. It’s historical fiction at its finest.

But it feels more like an exception than a rule. I suppose I might be alone in thinking that the closest this novel comes to recognizing the ideal form of the Historical Novel is in this scene rather than in the very many “fine” passages Barkan unfolds about Trump and ordinances. But all of those paragraphs feel inert in a way that the tennis does not. Because in the tennis, he has captured in full multi-dimensional representation the time, History. And what Mona does—acting, finally, rather than just noting things changing—produces more than a transcript of social change: she breaks through.

I’d like to end by talking a bit about character in this novel. I tweeted a couple days ago, “I am not sure if the characters in this novel are sociopaths or if the narrator of the novel is a sociopath.” I want to explain a little of what I mean. The moment that prompted this observation occurs near the middle-ish of the book. Mona and Saul have been raising Emmanuel, their illegitimate son, for many years now. Saul is still married, in part, he says, because he doesn’t want Felicia, his wife, to lose a husband as well as a son. Their son Tad left the family without a word after discovering Saul’s long-running infidelity and the birth of Emmanuel. One afternoon, Saul and Emmanuel are at a baseball game when Saul gets word that Felicia has been in a very serious car accident. Saul takes Emmanuel home and explains the situation to Mona, who is understanding in the moment, but later, they have an argument.

Mona says that Saul, after spending a long day at the hospital, has gone back to the bed he shares with her, meaning Felicia. Saul then says that she, Mona, and Emmanuel are his priority. He says he doesn’t love Felicia. He only loves Mona and their son, etc. On and on. But Mona is cold and keeps drawing his attention to the fact that he is married. Now, at this point, it’s been like, two decades. They have been raising a kid together for eight years. Fully carrying on behind Saul’s family’s back. This man is telling his wife that he’s in Europe on “business” while he spends summers being a full-time dad to Emmanuel. And his wife (whom he’s been betraying for two decades, mind you) is in a coma, maybe going to die, and she’s like, Go home to your wife. Not a glimmer of understanding. Or compassion. Not a flicker of care. And the speed with which Saul jettisons his wife in this conversation. I found it…honestly, I found it rather unbelievable. And if not unbelievable, then silly.

I don’t know that you can have a secular infidelity novel in a morally relativistic universe. I just don’t know that you can do that. Because the result is…this. This cold, empty sense that what they’re doing isn’t even that bad or insane? It just felt so hollow at first and by the time I got to this moment, I thought, man, so, like they don’t feel bad? Like at all? This lady might never walk again, and Mona is the one over here wanting reassurance? When she has been receiving the bulk of this man’s attention. Also, when he rightfully brings up that Mona didn’t want to marry him, she just basically shrugs. Then there’s Saul, who isn’t much better. After Mona’s birthday party, when Felicia is well into her new life, he thinks:

He tried not to pity himself when his wife was the one who needed help going to the bathroom. He tried to smile for her and keep as much of this existence from Mona as possible. Because Mona didn’t want to hear about Felicia. In Brooklyn, with Mona and Emmanuel, he lived days of liberation.

Like, are these people sociopaths? I don’t need them to be saints. I don’t need them to be kind, even. But the lack of awareness. Or self-reflexivity. I mean. It’s a bit hard to take. Particularly in a novel that seems so ready to turn over every object and moment for symbolic interpretation. This moment felt curiously absent that kind of insight.

Sure, in life, people do all kinds of things. They say all kinds of things. Life has the great privilege of not having to make sense. A novel is not life. I found the novel’s rather…silly understanding of human nature rather exasperating after a while. It has a better understanding of society as a whole. I should say, it has a theory about society and, at times, it is very elegant at explaining that theory. But the characters. Man, the characters. Mona Glass might be the most sociopathic American creation since Undine Spragg (derogatory).

As I finished the novel, I was reminded of a different decade-spanning family saga with infidelity and divorce at its center. Ann Patchett’s genius Commonwealth. The novels share a number of uncanny resemblances, right down to the prodigal son who returns to New York without telling anyone, takes up a delivery job, and spends his time reading. This happens to Tad in Glass Century. The novels are different in a number of ways. Ann Patchett is focused on her characters more than the social dimension, where Barkan views characters as a means to an end. Barkan writes with a kind of gleeful documentarian’s eye, placing real things and places in his story. Patchett takes a more ambivalent relationship to the real. Yet, I must acknowledge that Patchett’s novel moved me in ways that Barkan’s novel did not and could not by virtue of Ann Patchett’s superior understanding of human nature. And time’s passage in Commonwealth felt more acute to me despite its more compressed presentation. The novels are different, of course. Commonwealth is not a Historical Novel nor is it trying to be. Its ambition is ultimately to unfold the history of one family, personal, painful histories shot through with the radiance of insight and that strange thing we call love. Barkan’s novel is also filled with love, but the light is dimmer, colder, more obscured.

A friend asked me what I thought of Glass Century. I said somewhat jokingly but not jokingly that I had liked it better when Ann Patchett wrote it. But that’s not fair. I mean. So few of us are Ann Patchett. And Ross Barkan might one day write a novel better than Commonwealth. I certainly hope so. But the thing I really hope he writes? A tennis novel with people in it who talk like real people.

This whole time, I have avoided discussing The New Romanticism and Substack and the larger orbit to which Barkan belongs. I have also tried to leave out my opinions on those things and focus only on what I felt and thought as I read his novel. But because someone said something really annoying on Substack earlier today, I hope you will grant me this one indulgence here at the very end. Someone said, responding to a Substack note, that Substack is the anti-MFA and that program writing has no place here. They were responding to a note that praised a cohort of writers who belong to Ross Barkan’s orbit.

What I will say about this is that, one, MFA programs are not aesthetically programmatic. There is no MFA style. There is no unifying aesthetic vision of MFA fiction because MFA programs are not confederated or organized. They do not belong to an aesthetic program. Much of what people complain about when they complain about “MFA fiction” is merely literary realism as it has unfolded in the Anglophone world post-2015. Your beef is not with MFA programs. Your beef is with mimetic realism. Take it up with Auerbach.

As to the charge of Substack’s un-programmatic writing. Be so serious. Be so for real, right now. Barkan belongs to a (self-)named literary movement. He founded a publication, The Metropolitan Review, to further an aesthetic program. He and a handful of other writers are literally in the process of generating reams of criticism to firmly establish the aesthetic parameters of their program. They are quite literally Prorgammatic Writers in the same way that 19th Century French Realism had a programmatic basis. And 19th Century American Realism had a programmatic basis. And 19th Century British Realism had a programmatic basis. In the same way that Social Realism had a programmatic basis. In the same way that Naturalism had a programmatic basis.

Now, you can say you like the program. Or you can say you don’t. You can argue about the parameters. You can do all sorts of things. But to say that there is no Programmatic writing on this platform is wrong. I have my own opinions about the value of the project, but it is very clear to me that there is a project. I don’t think Barkan or his comrades would disagree about the existence of a project. I think if you are going to continue to discuss the work being made under the auspices of “The New Romanticism,” I think you have to call it what it is because otherwise, like, you’re lying to yourself.

Once again, the MFA is being made a scapegoat for something totally unrelated because people do not know their fucking terms or because one of their teachers once told them to write some realism. Like, grow up.

B