Ross Barkan's "Glass Century" and Some Thoughts On The New Romantic Movement

There’s a sense of heightened stakes when the most influential people on literary Substack release their most hyped novels a month apart. With John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, and Ross Barkan’s Glass Century dropping at the bullseye center of the 2020s, the question lingering in every author’s mind, whether Substack can exist as a self-sustaining literary ecosystem for its top novelists may soon have its answer. These two, along with Matthew Gasda who will release Sleepers the same day as Glass Century and Noah Kumin whose Stop All The Clocks arrives in June, have been the central figures of what has long been speculated to be an emergent new romanticism in the literary world. The degree to which each of these writers personally accepts the label varies as much as the romantic elements within the novels themselves. Glass Century in particular shares far more DNA with Balzac than Blake, and though I have yet to read it, I’d be quite shocked if the same were true of Major Arcana. And yet, why not think of it as a unified movement? Even if its present state is more aligned in its objections to contemporary literary trends than any obvious aesthetic sensibilities, they are in closer conversation than many movements of the past. If the simple conception of “Romanticism” as a “thematic development that turns away from contemporary forms of fiction and develops its own contrasting kind” is good enough for Northrop Frye, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us, even it remains to be seen if a “contrasting” form emerges.

So how do we reconcile Ross, editor of The Metropolitan Review and the closest thing 2020s romanticism has to an Ezra Pound, with Ross the social documentarian writing in a genre that has been historically placed (perhaps mistakenly) as romanticism’s antithesis? Perhaps with less labor than one imagines. The very idea of a print magazine focused solely on literature and cinema seemed one of nearly Quixotic idealism in the post internet era, and little in the way of algorithm could have predicted its success. This quiet idealism permeates Glass Century, as its free spirited protagonists succumb slowly to compromise, much like the New York City itself.

When we meet our protagonists in 1973, they are already crawling under the slinking weight of collapsed traditions. Mona Glass, a rising tennis star, is preparing for a fake wedding with her former professor, Saul Plotz. Saul is already married with two kids and is leading a double life. Mona is an individualist free spirit wanting nothing to do marriage, but she must get her parents off her back somehow. Along with her friends Live and Al, Mona tries to ironize the wedding planning the best that she can, but the weight of the dress, of the ceremony at large, is too much to laugh off. Even with a fake rabbi, the postmodern irony of her generation cannot untether her from the ritual’s intrinsic meaning. The legality of this arrangement matters much less than the ritual itself.

Saul Plotz, like his literary forebears Zuckerman and Angstrom and Bascomb, is torn between two unspoken desires: a postwar family man respectability and an escape from bourgeois domesticity. Little is said about his wife, Felicia; we never know how she and Saul fell out of love or if they were ever in love to begin with. Saul hints to Mona he got married young to satisfy some social expectation, but we have nothing to go on here but his word. Five years into their affair, Mona realizes how strongly his adoration for her is hinged on her image of the anti-housewife, or “anti-Felicia.” Felicia loves to cook; Mona hates it; Felicia wears dresses; Mona only wore one for her sham wedding; Felicia wanted to be a wife; Mona does not. And yet, Saul wants nothing more than to see Mona in a dress and tied down to the same sort of domesticity he seemingly detests in Felicia.

Saul’s confused ideals and Mona’s lingering sense of being his “escape” is a source of always present tension in their lifelong affair. Here, the novel’s wide scope multi-perspective approach serves its purpose beyond simple repudiation of the single perspective literary status quo allowing Mona Glass to inhabit not one mythology but several: the scrappy tomboy, the failed protege, the daredevil photographer, the type A devouring mother, and, through Saul’s eyes, the inscrutable madwoman muse. Mona’s surname, unlike its use in the book’s title which evokes the retrospective fragility of not just a metropolis but the entire American id, underlies not her frailty but her reflective capacity: in classic Gen X fashion (though she is not quite Gen X), she rejects all mythologies others have bestowed on her: irritated when a masked vigilante insists on talking to her and only her to relay a “message” to the public, and unmoved by that same public’s decades long memorialization of her infamous photograph of said vigilante. Mona cares as little for her role as a Fear Street souvenir as she does her role as the autonomous shrew in Saul’s second life, and yet she cannot quite give up either.

Saul’s dualism is most strongly externalized in his two sons: Emmaneul, the love child he has with Mona, whom he develops the strongest bond with, and Tad, his legitimate son, who drops contact with Saul entirely to go on a Kerouac-like excursion across America. Emmanuel represents the stable, familial side of Saul who above all seeks love and belonging, sometimes to his own peril: Emmanuel’s softhearted, people pleasing tendencies ironically lead him to become a small-time drug dealer at an elite prep school, and Tad is the mirror phantom of the younger freewheeling Ken-Kesey-reading Saul that Saul ultimately neglects in order to salvage as much of a traditional familial life with Mona as he can. It is in Tad’s storyline where the romantic structure of Glass Century most shines. Set off by an unexpected twist which I won’t reveal here, Tad goes down a violent path and becomes something of a prophetic outlaw. I’m being vague here, but this is probably the most salacious subplot in the novel but at times seems almost abridged. Events that could have almost warranted their own novel are summarized in mere paragraphs. This section could have gone another fifty pages, and the novel would still not have felt bloated. It is perhaps Barkan’s unerringly classical restraint that is simultaneously the novel’s greatest strength and weakness.

The beauty of Glass Century lies less in its individual scenes than the panoramic effect of its whole. It mimics life in the sense that things seem to just be happening to these characters with no throughline, but unlike life, a throughline does emerge. The historic events of 9/11 and later, Covid, do feature prominently but not as plot points for convenient tragedy. There is a quiet stoicism in the way Saul Plotz, Mona Glass, and New York City at large carry on through the seismic ruptures of history that points less to tragedy than quiet resilience. While Glass Century is about fallen institutions and fallen ways of life, there remains even in the gentrified, artificial present a sense of familial togetherness that resists social atomization despite every effort of the 21st century at large. This makes it earnest in a way most contemporary New York novels wouldn’t dare to be, yet rarely sentimental. Nor does it resort to online neologisms to make itself seem contemporary, opting instead to show us the world we live in today with its twentieth century heart firm on its sleeve. Millennial authors fearing for their relevancy might take note.

For those in New York, Ross Barkan is having a Glass Century release party in conversation with Adelle Waldman on May 6th. I might be there myself if I can get a few things sorted. We’ll see.