Glass Century. By Ross Barkan. New York: Tough Poets Press, 2025. 484 pp. $33.99.
You can always count on a journalist for a simple prose style. Clear and concise, so as to establish trust by implying something like this: look at my plain talk, I’ve not hiding anything. If that promise can be made without any fuss or distracting noise, then any good story will be a good read. The who, what, when, where, and why will be interest enough. And so it is when journalists write novels: if they can fabricate an alluring story, the right fake reality to report on, they can type and type in those taut, trained sentences, and the reader will keep going. (It is not quite the same for those genre novelists who keep the language simple, as they have to be scary, for horror, systematically inventive, for science fiction or fantasy, or gushy, for romance.) Whatever the style, the long novel by the journalist has the advantage of a particular professional energy, that of the roving eye, which will carry it through any weaknesses and dubious passages without flagging. However they write, Dickens, Dreiser, and Tom Wolfe run on enthusiasm, shared by author and reader. For the novelist Ross Barkan, who while publishing three novels has been writing for New York Magazine, New York Times, and lately on Substack (Political Currents), the role models may be writers other than these, but the tradition is that same one, wherein the reporter turns his attention half inward, to his own creations, and becomes the writer of the tireless, rangy social novel, metropolitan in scale but personal in its composition and color.