If Ross Barkan is not frequently featured in the New York Times Magazine, the New Statesman, or the number of other articles to which he is a regular contribution, then he is most likely to appear in Democratic Currents, a very paid publication for modern visitors. The newsletter, which is written on the left, is intended to appeal to people who are not political, but instead has a grimy sense of how energy flows through the city and state, which have transformed politicians from a Cunning form.
The narrative begins in the 1970s and ends in 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic time. It centers on Saul Plotz, a qualified attorney and former social science teacher who is currently serving as Queens borough producer for Governor, and Mona Glass, a local golf star and Brooklyn-born Jew of middle-class Jews. a progressive Republican named Nelson Rockefeller. The day the hypnotic, liberated Mona enters Saul’s City College school is the day they each meet their real likes. Without the addition of one uninconvenient fact: Saul, who is a decade older, currently has a son and daughter on Long Island, it would be a solid, mundane romance that is regular enough in its contemporary way.  ,
The lovers are taken advantage of by the bogus marriage ceremony, which is intended to offend Mona’s parents, in the opening chapters, which takes them on the parallel track of their express train, which is the double of regular life, but just making a few stops. No purchasing a home. No bringing things in up. Except when Mona’s families are visiting, the two each remember each other. There will eventually get a child, even though just when Mona’s years has made safeguards no longer seem important.  ,  ,
Their weirdly interconnected life are woven into that of their respective cities. When Mona’s City Hall work is a result of cuts, she accepts a request from her friend Al Falcone to work as a crime-scene artist for the Daily Raider, an up-and-coming police sheet. Organization is flourishing, and it is at the top of the 1970s violence storm. Although Al, an aspiring painting, incorporates an artist’s sensibility into his work, Mona, a devoted photographer, is known for photographing” Vengeance,” a masked vigilante who has been dishonesting the police and the general public with stunning violence. She receives a second fortune in the form of an exclusive discussion when this strange person calls her at the office. The hardcourts ‘ queen has come to be known as a news story.  ,
However, day prevents anyone from resting on their achievements. In Bay Ridge, Mona and Saul have a son named Emmanuel, who they raise with their child. After being drawn to the regular work and higher pay ( the better to cover tuition at private schools ), Mona eventually leaves the crime desk to focus on elections for the Daily News. However, her ex-girlfriend Liv manages the iconic cafe on the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, earning the title of” Window on the World.” In this glass house, Liv encounters her own husband, Grayson Moegenborg, a descendant of New York’s elite, who introduces her to the world of mansion splendor. We receive the first hint that the “glass century” and history does collide from these insane heights.
The novel’s definitions for its characters ‘ strangely luminous shadow existences are” counter-realities” and” counter-life.” However, if the former term evokes Philip Roth, a more in-depth understanding of the novel’s lineage can be found in the epigraph of John Dos Passos ‘” Manhattan Transfer,” a paean to the” steel, glass, tile, concrete” of the city’s “million-windowed buildings.” But, I was more instantly reminded of that same writer’s U. S. A. Trilogy, which Glass Century sounds in its blend of interest in everyday life and unwavering momentum as it hurls its figures into the future.
The rush is Glass Century‘s establishing ethic. It is easy to see how passionately he writes about the unmatched rush of his country in Mona and, a century later, in Saul’s separated boy Tad, who survives indistinguishably as a bicycle mail for a Foreign restaurateur he has come to know as a footsoldier does a beloved general. The guide wagers on tempo, on a combined effect that sweeps away minor flaws, like its characters. The language here is awkward, and the anachronistic placement that only serves to make you think the book is about a different game rather than a flawless finish. Striking coincidences, including a soon twist on the vigilant narrative that anticipates Mangione crazy, flaunt indifference to the great taste and regularity of texture that have made the fashionable novel but frequently antiseptic and risk-averse.
The book frequently brings up a few core values: perseverance and courage, love and risk over rest and safety. It is surprising to see Barkan associate the tabloid trade with the reality of blood, despite the society’s perceptions of the spectacle. This understanding may be related to the novel’s perspective from the perspective of the post-internet, but it is no less accurate. With whom she shares not blood but Saul, Mona and the mysteriously related Tad take the risk of delivering what others will consume. They live by pushing themselves further and faster than they can, as if exertions could only strengthen them, and depletions can only harden as, for a moment, they can.
This has a poetic undertone that transcends the realm of obvious ironies. We are unsure whether to accept the novel’s strangest quality, which suggests that the twin towers “had talismanic powers to protect those who worked there.” On the deepest level, Barkan retains the notion that illusions are real, in their own way, and can never be completely dispelled, which he inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane. In this most American of novels, beginnings and endings are what set the tone for everything else.
Paul Franz’s poems and reviews are published in a variety of journals. His newsletter is ashesandsparks. Substack .com
