Interview with Ross Barkan About His Novel "Glass Century"

My debut thriller, CUBAFRUIT, comes out Monday, Februrary 3! You can pre-order it now, on Amazon, for $3.99.

My guest on the podcast today is

Ross Barkan

. He’s the author of a Substack newsletter, Political Currents, in which he writes mostly about politics but squeezes in a word on books, music, random cultural items; he’s a contributing writer to The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Times Magazine; he’s been pretty prolific for a while now but 2025 is a bigger year for him than usual. On top of reaching new heights for his newsletter’s following, Ross is the recent co-founder of a new literary journal, @metropolitan review Metropolitan Review, he’s got a book of political essays coming out in March (barring any editorial hiccups) and he’s got a novel, Glass Century, coming out in May.

And Glass Century is the focus of our talk today. Ross was kind enough to send me an advance copy, which I was interested to read because of his political insights on the newsletter, and I found it not only engrossing but maybe also a bit totemic.

“I don’t think novels about upper middle class people feeling anxious about the Internet are necessarily what people want.”

-Ross Barkan

Baby Boomers and Gen X have already generated their Rushmore of novelists, at this point, who’ve explored the defining episodes and dramas and figures of their respective generations, the defining personal hangups, but that hasn’t happened quite yet with millennials. We know that 9/11 is a turning point, Internet 2.0, getting onto social media at just about the age of puberty, and without any sort of precedent to illustrate just how lasting and disastrous our posts could be. You might bookend the Millennials’ formative years by saying it started with Super Nintendo and ended with the pandemic.

But Barkan’s forthcoming novel is among the first Millennial novels to do that for its own generation. It’s a family saga. It starts in the late 1960s, it ends during the Covid lockdown, and in the course of 400ish pages it runs with motifs of division, of societal structures that seem powerful and enduring but prove to be glass-like: fragile, transparent, decorous—and finally (symbolically) shattering: first with the fall of the Twin Towers, which did away with a previous generation’s notion of American invulnerability, and then with Covid-19, when society itself shut down.

It seems to suggest that a defining motif in the Millennial mindset is a need to find people, and forge real connections, despite the now-obvious fragility of those structures in which we were taught, by previous generations, to find them.

Millennials, for instance, are the first generation to find some of their most formative interpersonal relationships within a sheet of glass: desktop monitors and phone screens.

Glass Century shows people coming together—in romance, friendship, business and politics—and how those relationships tend to be strongest when they defy some cultural definition of what such a relationship ought to be.

An ambitious young woman sets up a fake wedding with the love of her life, who’s married to another woman, just so her parents will take their relationship seriously. A painter finds fulfillment in (and respect for) his work only once he accedes to the fact that it’ll never make him any money, and he’ll only be “a painter” in the eyes of a few people, but he needs a different daytime identity. A police officer, whose task is to make a dent in the city’s crime, finds he can only do that when he removes his uniform and puts on a mask. Another young woman finds true love with a much older and wealthier man—but refuses to marry him…because to marry him (the culturally-appropriate symbol of a legitimate loving union) would in fact give people the opposite impression: that she’s a gold digger.

Taking place primarily in a pre-digital age, what Barkan’s novel seems to be doing is looking for that non-existent precedent we (as Millennials) were looking for when we found ourselves finding love and friendship and meaning…through glass screens. Bonds and epiphanies that, though they were discovered through a screen of glass, felt way more steady and firm than the “unsinkable” cultural ships that, year after year, seemed to capsize all around us.