Glass Century
By Ross Barkan
Tough Poets Press, 484 pages, $33.99
The “competitive verticality” of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, wrote the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, was once “an architectural panorama reflecting the capitalist system itself.” That all changed, however, with the construction of the World Trade Center in 1973. “This architectural graphism,” Baudrillard went on, “is the embodiment of a system that is no longer competitive, but digital and countable, and from which competition has disappeared in favor of networks and monopoly.” The Twin Towers, those identical, bar graph-like temples to the American gods of artifice, decadence, and freedom jutting forth toward the heavens generated both “attraction and repulsion,” and, in some, “a secret desire to see them disappear.”
“The 9/11 attacks held up a mirror to the American dream.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, America was forced to confront the ultimate implications of its fascination with mythical, “hyperreal” fantasies. The 9/11 attacks held up a mirror to the American dream of a society in which all “negativity is banished.” In the nearly 24 years that have passed since then, the burning towers have made cameos in novels by authors ranging from Don Delillo to Ottessa Moshfegh. But few have captured their horror and the lasting impact they’ve had on an entire generation better than Ross Barkan in his new novel, Glass Century. A native New Yorker who has covered the city’s politics as a journalist, Barkan has now turned to fiction to offer a more expansive view of the phenomena to which he’s dedicated countless articles—urban planning, housing, law enforcement, and more.
Glass—in addition to being the surname of one of the novel’s main characters—is a recurring motif, embodying the paradoxical nature of American exceptionalism. It is symbolic of the smooth veneer, the alluring sheen of perfected, bureaucratic systems of commerce and governance; of the “neoliberal consensus” and the pristine, sanitized neighborhoods it has spawned; of screens opening the doors to an infinity of virtual realms; of self-made individuals who have climbed their way up the ladder of success to enjoy a glamorous, liberated lifestyle. But the sturdiness and radiant allure of glass can shatter at the drop of a stone (or an airplane).
Glass Century follows Mona Glass and Saul Plotz and the complex web of relationships in which they find themselves caught from the 1970s up until the Covid lockdowns. At the beginning of the novel, Mona prevails upon Saul, her childhood friend, to fake a marriage with her so as to appease her overbearing Jewish mother, who was not too keen on Mona’s determination to live as an independent career woman. A prototypical liberal feminist of her generation, Mona has defied gender norms since her childhood, opting to play sports rather than with dolls, and beating up boys rather than flirting with them. Saul, married to another woman, continues to make occasional appearances for dinner with Mona and her parents. But over time, their sham marriage turns into a passionate affair, and produces a child.
Throughout the novel, Saul is torn between his official family in Long Island, his secret life with Mona and their son Emmanuel in Brooklyn, and his demanding real estate job in Manhattan. As much as she’s in love with him, Mona’s determination to remain independent keeps her from taking up Saul’s offer to leave his wife and kids and move into her Bay Ridge apartment. Mona’s career in photojournalism takes off after she snaps a rare photo of Vengeance, a masked vigilante active on New York’s streets during the crime wave in the 1980s.
The novel’s plot reflects the changes in the city’s life and governance through the years of the crime wave, of rapid real estate development and the alliance between politics and corporate interests (during which a young Donald Trump makes an appearance), to Rudy Giuliani’s tough-on-crime policies and determination to clean up the streets. The erection of the Twin Towers heralds the transition from the raw, grimy city—which required grit, street-smarts, and chutzpah to get by, to the new “glass century,” in which those with the right credentials made it, and those who didn’t were relegated to the city’s margins.
“For older people,” Barkan writes, “these Twin Towers were a violent intrusion. The Towers had come from the future.” The World Trade Center was “a city unto itself, like a science fiction dream made real just in time for fiscal calamity.” The Windows on the World restaurant on the top floors of the North Tower permitted those who had “made it” to the top to feel “momentarily exceptional,” like “sky gods.”
“The threat of violence prowls beneath this facade of safety.”
As much as the characters welcome the newfound air of freedom and “invincibility” that the times ushered in, there is something artificial, almost “script-like” about it. Despite the drop in crime rates and plethora of opportunities in the new New York City, the characters can’t shake the sense that there is something eerie lurking right around the corner. The “neighborhoods encased in glass, screens flitting like blades in the sun, wealth supplanting violence” felt like “science fiction.” Despite its wane, the threat of violence prowls beneath the surface of this facade of safety, threatening to come back with a vengeance—more explosive and terrifying than before.
Watching the Twin Towers burn from the BQE on that fateful Tuesday morning, Mona can’t help but see it as “cinema, bad fiction, a plot point dreamt up as too ridiculous for art and discarded somewhere else.” The possibility that her loved ones working there—those who had made it, who had climbed their way up to the summit of the American Dream—might be trapped in “the holy hell of it” seemed “beyond the realm of belief altogether.”
In a 2024 essay on Donald Trump’s outer-borough New York City roots, Barkan wrote of the “psychological chasm” between parts of the outer boroughs that have taken on the lifestyle and mentality of Manhattan’s “professional class” and the “deep” parts that retain more local flavor. He recalls a time when Brooklyn neighborhoods that are now heavily gentrified were strongly ethnic “industrial outposts” with a strong sense of rootedness and neighborliness. Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, where Barkan grew up—and where much of Glass Century takes place—have managed to stave off the neutralizing wave that has hit Williamsburg and other areas.
Barkan still lives in his childhood neighborhood and writes about it with affection. His approach to fiction, marked by a commitment to roots, to the raw and real—sets him at a remove from the politically acceptable “diversity” fiction written by his more careerist peers and the nihilistic autofiction written by his irony-pilled ones. He has bluntly stated that his “aim is to be a great novelist”—a statement that he would have once “been embarrassed to state so directly.” But now, he feels that “ambition is nothing to be ashamed of—honesty, even less so. Coyness is tiresome.” He has “complaints about contemporary fiction, so why not write the book I think should exist in the world?” Glass Century is “is my attempt—great or flawed, you may decide” to put “my money where my mouth is.”
In an age in which ironic memes about 9/11 have become commonplace, Glass Century stands out for its sincerity and seriousness of purpose. It is a love letter to the Big Apple, written with a true New Yorker’s attention to nuance and detail. In our era, warned Baudrillard, centralization “sweeps away all differences and values.” The antidote, he proposes, is the revival of “subtle singularities.” On this front, Glass Century delivers.