Spotlight on “Glass Century” by Ross Barkan

About Glass Century

It’s 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives.

The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man. After losing her city job in the 1970s fiscal crisis, Mona becomes a freelance news photographer for a radical new tabloid. When she beats the competition to capture a photo of a murderous vigilante taking the city by storm, she finds herself falling for a colleague-and Saul, now a rising star in government who is butting up against a young man named Donald Trump, fears he has lost her altogether. Years later, the affair not quite dead, Mona realizes she is pregnant with Saul’s child.

Meanwhile, Saul’s adult son, Tad, is traveling aimlessly across America, hunting for answers as the 1990s bleed into 9/11. Tad decides to take the darker path of the very vigilante Mona once exposed. And in the shadow of terrorism and war, Mona and Saul raise their son, Emmanuel, together-keeping their life a secret from Saul’s wife and children. Spanning from the 1970s to the pandemic, this soaring, heartbreaking novel is a tour de force of ambition and grace, a great American chronicle that marks the emergence of a major new talent.

Praise for Glass Century

“A smart, stylish and original New York novel. Barkan knows the city inside and out, and Glass Century evokes the New York of the 70s as well as any recent work of fiction I can think of while also centering a powerful, decades-long love story that is as complex and believable as it is ultimately moving.”—Adelle Waldman

“Tennis and love and the city, and the insatiable fire that is history. Glass Century has it all. Barkan’s novel is both a marvelous paean to NYC and a spectacularly moving novel.”—Junot Díaz

“Glass Century is old-fashioned in a good way, moving storytelling in the classic social realist style about the only taboo kink left, adultery.”—Nell Zink

“The soundtrack to Ross Barkan’s new novel should be a wailing siren. Glass Century keeps pace with an anxious and changing New York as it tracks its protagonists from the Fear City day of the early seventies through September 11 and onward to the trauma of COVID-19. Generous and funny, this smart, expansive book kept me utterly engrossed.”—Christopher Sorrentino

“You won’t be able to put it down. Ross Barkan captures ‘the drift of time away from wherever you used to be.’ You are all the characters, each scene engrossing as quicksand, sucking you in. It starts like an inverse Taming of the Shrew (you nearly plotz with laughing) and transforms into a profound meditation on marriage, tennis, family, politics and the vicissitudes of life. Glass Century, with its two main characters, Mona Glass and Saul Plotz, mirrors the monumental twin towers that loom in the novel: ‘the ocean of dark sky pressed against the long, thick glass.'”—Jill Hoffman“

Barkan ambitiously reconciles the restlessness and enormity of the last half century without succumbing to the pretense and superficiality of idealism or relatability. This alone is a feat, but by its end, we have become the empire and the empire has become us.”—Zain Khalid