The American novel has long been in decline. Like most disasters, this one has many fathers; no single cause is fully explanatory. But all of them tell us something relevant. General literacy is down. The consumer model has robbed the university system of tradition and talent. Classical languages are in free fall. Men play video games and don’t buy books. Smartphones have shattered attention spans.
Rather than resist the pressure toward full-spectrum progressivism over the past decade, mainstream imprints gave in. The gender gap favoring women widened to comical degrees, and sensitivity readers became the norm. Editor-author relationships are conducted over email, rather than through letters and lunches. Overpriced Master of Fine Arts programs gave birth to a veritable genre, the MFA novel, each offering distinguished mainly by sameness. Novels are detached from history and philosophy, stuck, like an algorithm scroll, in the meaningless present; and even then, even after sacrificing all kinds of complexity — syntactic, structural, moral, and emotional — only romance novels have consistent readerships; pandering to the present has not saved the literary novel.
There are no silver-bullet fixes to this literary polycrisis. Pessimism is justified until proved otherwise, until a side-effect-free antidote to phone addiction — or better yet, general stupidity — is widely available in drugstores. But short of a miracle, entrepreneurial and courageous authors may still write new books that break out of this literary wasteland, and discerning readers may still buy, read, and talk about those books.
To be sure, writing and reading novels outside of the corporate vetting machine, without pre-approval and packaging, does not guarantee quality; “wild” self-published or independent novels are not good by dint of being different. But difference is at least a precondition of a renaissance. If talented writers can’t get into the system, then they should stop performing tricks for it.
Ross Barkan’s new and much discussed novel, Glass Century, signals a shift. The author — a contributor to these pages and a New York magazine columnist — offers a moving, multigenerational social novel set primarily in the less glamorous parts of the five Boroughs. Glass Century, in terms of form and content, is a novel of the midcentury: it slowly builds a picture of life. Like many older novels, but few new ones, it remains open to digressions and to detail — and is less fundamentally concerned with pace and voice: more substance, less flash.
It’s significant that Barkan has published Glass Century through a small imprint (Tough Poets) and has seemingly done much of the publicity for the book himself; rather than write a novel that momentarily fits a hot category or responds to a strain of contemporary discourse, Barkan wrote an ambitious novel first, and has used his own platform (primarily Substack) to attract and naturalize readers to the style; make readers come to the book, not the other way around. This is the way.
The author depicts a functional, lived-in New York City, where working people fall in love, raise families, struggle, and figure shit out. For Barkan — a Bay Ridge kid, immersed in city politics — Gotham is an organism. The organism, in turn, gives its citizens purpose, verve, and resilience.
The novel’s titular hero, Mona Glass, when we first meet her at age 24, is charmingly flawed; horny and tomboyish, unwilling to settle down; her youth is New York City’s chic senesence: the Seventies. Mona’s older lover, Saul Plotz, is already married and a father of two. To please her old-fashioned parents, they stage a legally meaningless marriage ceremony. Mona is passionate, independent, competitive. She came to like Saul because he “let her curse, never questioned it, even tossed in his own.” Mona finds “private liberation in curse words — fucking, shit, damn, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker.”
Mona, through the cocaine Eighties, is always in motion, playing tennis, running, biking, having sex, photographing (she becomes a successful photojournalist after she snaps a photo of a mysterious vigilante). The Daily News pays her a higher rate than the New York Post; her tennis game grows stronger with age; “winning” is part of the “small, beautiful glory” of Mona’s life. Mona Glass is vital and vitally rendered.
At age 40, and at the end of the Eighties, Mona, who has been sleeping with the incorrigible Saul the whole time, finds herself pregnant; and she decides to keep the baby. Barkan includes no discourse about motherhood or family; Mona’s career and choices aren’t pathologized or editorialized. They just are. Life is just what happens; she isn’t the paralyzed subject of contemporary fiction who agonizes over childrearing.
“Dissociation and internet addiction, in the 2020s, have become axiomatically literary.”
She commits to motherhood for the same reason she stages a marriage to Saul or takes photos or plays tennis: she’s good at reinventing herself; at tackling what is in front of her. The long, compromised, fitful, essentially lifelong relationship between Mona and Saul. and their flawed relationships with their children, are merely representative of people getting by, year after year, decade after decade, era after era.
Barkan has a gift for naive (as in, pre-internet) speech patterns and descriptions of behavior; he sympathetically reconstructs a part of the American past, and the reader follows. Glass Century is a new book that feels old; and this is healthy. Glass Century is a corrective lens for the eye that can only see the present. Barkan’s America is a place where men like Saul “[slurp].. black coffee and [puff] from a pack of Marlboros,” watching the Twin Towers burn and thinking that America is “an ineffable and mystical life force” — a humane, unpretentious America with a touch of sentimentality.
That willingness to allow for some sentimental humanism leak into the text is what sets Glass Century apart from so many New York novels written by authors under 35 — books (think Honor Levy’s My First Book; Peter Vack’s Silly Boy) that too often take a meta-modern stance with flat, self-absorbed protagonists desperate for erotic attention or furious they can’t get it. Many of these books feel like they were written by people who were quite literally born after 2020 — after the fall. There’s no outside, no historical ground to stand on. Just the internet, just memes. No future either — just a flat, stale now.
So called alt-lit novels — which now means something like: select former indie authors repacked by a Big Five imprint — too often deploy the same basic trope: a solipsistic protagonist who narrates her own phantasmagoric breakdown. Dissociation and internet addiction, in the 2020s, have become axiomatically literary. Take this representative passage from Tao Lin’s Leave Society: “After three days of consciously attributing hazy despair, static negativity, and loss of mind control to modern urban society instead of other people, personal failings, or existence itself, he felt stably in a good mood again.”
And while maybe, the present does have a demoralizing, flattened texture, novels need something more. If novelists stop imagining, stop demonstrating curiosity about both the past and future, stop engaging in the deep, imaginative synthesis that takes us out and away from the pathologies of the present… then what are they up to? What’s the point? Book-ified memes or X posts aren’t good enough, aesthetically.
Novels need a metaphysical horizon. A Catholic novelist might gesture toward salvation. An existentialist urges us to live authentically. A Russian Orthodox writer like Dostoevsky wanted us to see the devil in modern ideas. Henry James showed us the formal qualities of life. Joyce gave us epiphanies. David Foster Wallace believed that Americans in the Eighties and Nineties might have turned off the TV, read, thought, and woken up.
Novels also need a past; they need genealogies, textures, roots — even if they’re set, roughly, now. This is why I suspect that, assuming the novel form will survive this decade, novels will not be written, largely, as they have been since at least the Nineties, by MFAs and publishing insiders, but by radical traditionalists and outsiders who can use tools like Substack (and whatever platforms on or offline emerge in the future) to assert counter-aesthetics.
John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, self-published and serialized on Substack before getting picked up by Belt Publishing is another salient example. Successful, lasting novels in the latter half of this decade will resemble, I suspect, Glass Century if not in literal form and content, then in the path they take to market: composed outside of institutions, presentist trends, fads — written for sheer pleasure, rather than Big Five exposure.
The larger point is that breaking from the tone and stylistics of the contemporary novel is to break from the metaphysics of contemporary life; to read and write differently is to summon and apply the mind’s resources in new ways. This is what is needed: to bundle the data of reality in ways that are different than the internet does, than social media does; the most exciting thing about novels conceived of, or promoted on Substack, for instance, is that they induce us to close the app.
