On Ross Barkan's 'Glass Century'

Ross Barkan's new novel, Glass Century, is not just a novel about New York City—sprawling, relentless, multi-vocal, and haunted by the past as well as the future: it is a novel that wants to be New York City. Like Don DeLillo's Underworld, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, or Teju Cole’s Open City, among others, Barkan's novel weaves personal stories into the variegated urban fabric of New York, capturing the rhythms, contradictions, family histories, and emotional churn of a metropolis in perpetual flux.