Novelist Ross Barkan joins me to discuss his forthcoming novel Glass Century - a multi-generational family chronicle set mostly in New York from the 1970s until the watershed moment of COVID in 2020. An admirable return to social realism, and a ‘novel of ideas’ that interrogates the possible causes of contemporary discontent; from the effects neoliberal economic policies, financialization, technological alienation and the follies of American imperialism - and their cumulative impact on interpersonal relations and culture.
A suspicion towards ‘Grand Narratives’ was inculcated, and has to a large extent been naturalised, by the Millennial generation heretofore resigned to the novelties of the meta-narrative as the highest form of creative subjectivity. Such narratives have, in turn, become somewhat stale. The Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, despite describing the realist novel as a ‘Bourgeois Epic’ - was thoroughly convinced of their political value. In Lukacs’s view, the novel served the Bourgeoisie well in their revolution against the Aristocracy. Lukacs wished for a Socialist Realist tradition to match those of the great bourgeois realist novelists such as Balzac, Zola, Dickens et al. For Lukacs, this was necessary antidote to the bourgeois ‘decadence’ of modernism, exemplified for him by the work of James Joyce and Marcel Proust, where ‘subjectivism’ and ‘irrationalism’, dominated:
This tendency gradually turns the novel into an aggregate of snapshots from the inner life of a person and leads in the end to the complete decomposition of any content and any form in the novel
Such conclusions were wholly rejected by the likes of Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno - who wished to defend the revolutionary vitality of the avant-garde, and form as a disruptive revolutionary potentiality. Indeed, the faults of Lukacs’s somewhat reactionary aestheticism was perhaps best summarised by the late Fredric Jameson:
What is really wrong with Lukacs’s analyses is not too frequent and facile a reference to social class, but rather too incomplete and intermittent a sense of the relationship of class to ideology. A case in point is one of the more notorious of Lukács’s basic concepts, that of ‘decadence’ – which he often associates with fascism, but even more persistently with modern art and literature in general. The concept of decadence is the equivalent in the aesthetic realm of that of ‘false consciousness’ in the domain of traditional ideological analysis. Both suffer from the same defect – the common presupposition that in the world of culture and society such a thing as pure error is possible.
It might well be claimed by many that this fundamental critique of Lukacs is what motivated the recuperation of meta-narrative subjectivity, in literature as well as in wider culture expression. And yet, since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of a technocratic Hyper-Capitalist China, we are a whole generation removed from ‘real existing Socialism’ and its aesthetic prescriptions. There is now in contemporary literature an unmistkable strain of the decadent bourgeois subjectivism which Lukacs warned about…a strain more potent for the fact that it is so banal, so stale, trite and formally uninteresting, and so far removed from the vital genius of the modernist writers who’s place in the bureaucratic ‘canon’ is assured, that it has in turn prompted a noticeable reaction against it.
Glass Century is an ambitious work which I think forms part of that, and it is quite far from ‘decadent. It’s very much in the tradition that Lukacs grudgingly admired, and its appearance should be of critical interest, at the very least for the fact that there are millenial writers capable enough of writing plausible and compelling social novels that give account of the familial, social and ideological forces that have shaped their generation…but for much more besides.
In this episode we discuss some of his influences, including the work of American master John Doss Passos - and his landmark novel The Manhatten Transfer, how his day-job as a political reporter, and his personal and professional engagement with the history of New York, informed the writing of his novel.
Glass Century will be published on the 6th of May 2025.
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