An interview with one of the most influential writers in this corner of the internet

I met Ross Barkan in the summer of 2024, when he quite unexpectedly came to my talk at the World Transsexual Forum. He had read my novel, The Default World, and he was a fan, conducting an interview with me for his newsletter, Political Currents by Ross Barkan .

Getting to know Ross over the last year has been such a pleasure. He’s an insightful commentator, with many thoughts on literature and politics. Whether it’s his piece on the weakness of the current assault on universities or about the counterproductive nature of Resistance liberalism, Barkan is willing to cut against pre-established narratives if he feels like they no longer reflect current realities.

Recently, Ross has become most notable as a heavy proponent of the Substack ecosystem. He is a booster of many small writers, many small accounts. For instance, his post about Major Arcana, which Ross read in serialized form, was what brought it to the attention of Anne Trubek and got John Pistelli his publishing contract. And he is co-editor (along with Lou Bahet) of a publication, The Metropolitan Review, which has given a determinate form to a certain slice of the Substack literary culture.

Basically he’s like all of us: he’s a writer, yes, but he’s also a poster; he’s excited by this fascinating new world, where so many different kinds of writers and thinkers have managed to come into conversation with each other online. And, like John Pistelli, he’s notable in this world for his open-mindedness and lack of status-consciousness. Just a month ago, he wrote a rave review of The Wayback Machine—a self-published novel. He’s the rare writer who can get prestigious bylines (he publishes regularly in New York and The New York Times Magazine), without letting those bylines become a part of his personal identity. Nobody exemplifies the democratic ethos of Substack better than him.

This quality also comes through in his fiction. He’s the author of three novels, and his most recent, Glass Century, came out just this week. Ross clearly wants to write accessible, intelligent books that do more than reflect the self-consciousness and status anxiety of a certain narrow set of elites.

Glass Century is a multi-generational family saga that takes spans fifty years of New York history, from 1970 to 2020. It’s about a reporter, Mona Glass, and her on-again, off-again affair with Saul Plotz, a staffer for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. These characters come of age in a hard, gritty, crime-ridden New York that’s on the verge of financial collapse. As they get older, the city gets shinier, but their own edges also get worn away. They face disappointment and failure and learn to make a place for themselves in the little corners and crevices of the city.

As with John Pistelli, I don’t totally feel comfortable reviewing a book by someone who’s said nice things about my own book, but I am very happy to invite Ross onto this newsletter to have a chat about his life and work—these are the typed notes from a call we had on Zoom last week.

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The Interview

Tell me about The Glass Century.

It's a big social novel that encompasses fifty years of history, almost—about a family—about a man and a woman who love each other, and are in an illicit relationship, and about the impact on two different children. It's a love story. It's a family saga. It's a social novel. It has a vigilante arc, where there's a vigilante running around New York City, and Mona is one of the first people to capture an image of the vigilante. It's a polyphonic novel that encompasses many different currents, many decades. I liken it to the work of Franzen and DeLillo. I think it's one of those books that, honestly, I wish there were more of: as a writer, you try to write the books that you like to read. I enjoy a wide range of literature: my bias is against the modern autofiction. I've grown tired of the pared down language and insular first-person self-referential narrators.

I was really struck by the 1970s setting in the early part of the novel. New York is gritty and run-down, but it also seems to have a lot of energy.

It's a remarkable period in many ways. It's where the modern era begins. You think of the rise of neoliberalism, the rise of Donald Trump. New York is at a crossroads, it is hours away from bankruptcy. The city has deindustrialized. The bankers don't want to give the city any money. You have still wealthy metropolis that stands for so much in the culture. At the same time in this period, you have a real bohemia, a lot of creation happening.

The crime in the 1970s is an undercurrent as well. The crime was a lot higher than it is today. The possibility of random acts of violence was a lot higher than today. You have a great city that can go in a lot of different directions. At the same time, Donald Trump has an appearance as a character. You have the rise of Trump. You can't tell the story of 1970s New York, therefore you can't tell the story of America without Trump. He makes his way in that period through a lot of luck and a lot of help from his father. So I knew when I was writing this novel that was exploring these decades—I knew I'd have to mention Trump. I was less interested in Trump as president, or Trump running for President, I wanted to think through Trump in the ‘70s and imagine him as a young man in his 20s, with his father, in the office of Saul, who's working for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. You have Fred Trump asking for a tax break, and you have Donald learning in the background. Saul has a negative reaction to both of them, but at the same time there's a magnetism to these figures that comes through.

When it comes to that time: my father had me at 50, he grew up in the 1950s and 60s. He grew up in the Mad Men era. There were similarities in how he carried himself. He was very open and friendly. He was not personally forthcoming. The men of that era kept it very buttoned up. As a child, I would always see him coming back in a tie and jacket and shoes. A lot of that era rubbed off on me because my upbringing. I was an older soul. I was drawn to that culture, because I had older parents.

The novel is not an autobiographical. I used contours, as novels do. You use contours of your life. I was thinking a lot about the era they lived in. Something my father would convey—he had a real optimism about him—he retained a lot of personal optimism. We think of eras. We think of the ‘70s, crime or chaos. But people are still alive then, they're young then. They’re still building lives. They don’t know what’s coming for them.

This is a novel about personal lives, love affairs, marriages or lack thereof. Parenting as well. I'm not a parent myself. I was thinking how parents relate to children. Your children, you love them and know them, and as they age, they built out their own private worlds. It's interesting, as we progress in society, parents want more and more from their children. They want to know more about their lives. They want more from them. As opposed to how parents were in the 20th century. Kids went out, they played, they got love and dinner, and then they went out the next day. I'm capturing a world where children have a degree of autonomy that they don’t currently enjoy.

Okay, I don’t know if you feel totally comfortable with this. But do you mind talking about Substack? This is your third novel, I believe. And the difference between this and your previous novels is that your profile has grown quite a bit recently because of your activity on Substack.

I was very early to Substack. I joined in 2020. And I didn't think at the time that I was arriving early. I thought I was coming a bit late, since Matt Taibbi had been on since 2019. I didn't feel like I was coming at what turned out to be a very early point in their development. It was during the pandemic, I was doing a lot of reporting on NYC and what was happening during the pandemic. I wanted somewhere to put some of my extra work, and Substack was a very usable blogging software.

I ported over some emails in 2020, I launched my Substack as the Cuomo Files. For the first two years I was doing politics. What changed in 2023 was Substack launched Notes. Once Substack puts out Notes, Musk throttles Substack links, and you can no longer get real growth out of Twitter, but Substack understands its better to build your ecosystem. That's what I did with Notes. What's great about Substack is it's way more useful because these are emails you own. With Twitter a lot of followers are bots and are not engaged. With Substack, people are reading your notes.

I found a lot more growth in 2023 and 2024. The real growth came when I pivoted off of politics and started writing much more literature and culture. I make a living out of politics, but to be honest literature is what I cared about more. The audience for writing about culture was quite large, and writing about literature and culture is quite large. If I'd asked most editors at major publications, they'd say you can't write a 5,000 piece about masculinity and literature. You can't write a piece that’s illustrated with a picture of Norman Mailer—who’s that, nobody cares about him.

But there is a huge under-served audience. The number of casual readers has definitely gone down, with the rise of smartphones. At the same time, there is a large enough cohort of people who read, and they aren't really being served the way they should be served.

And mainstream publishing has published weaker novels in the last five years, many of these novels don't break out.

I used to really lament the struggle to publish a novel—we've both been ghosted by agents and editors, really made to feel worthless. The 2010s was the last era when the machine could really mint literary stars, and if you're not being anointed it felt lousy.

I fought for years to get Glass Century published. Almost five years. The timing for this book is kind of perfect. Even in 2022, when my last book came out, I had a much smaller following and I wasn't really engaged with it that much. All I did was put out a few posts.

Now my following is much bigger. And you’ve got to promote your work yourself. Nobody else will. I felt very shy about my fiction. I struggle to talk about my novel, talk about myself. You have to engage, have to promote. If you're in book world, and you're not on Substack, you don't really exist aanymore. Unless you're a legacy writer, Jonathan Franzen and Sally Rooney don't need it. But other writers—Catherine Lacey, Alex Chee, you see the canny writers sort of sinking into Substack. A lot of other writers, who are being put out by big presses, if they're not engaged, they're gonna disappear.

Doesn’t it seem weird, though, that there’s an audience on Substack for writing about books? All of these the mainstream journals—Harpers, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair—are flailing, struggling to survive, they can’t find readers. You’d think if the number of readers was contracting, then there’d be no room for small players to grow so explosively on Substack.

[Newsletters] offer an unfiltered interesting voice that you can't find elsewhere. All these publications you mentioned do good work, but it tends to be very predictable. You look at the successful substackers: Sam Kriss, for instance. He writes in a way...I read him in the New York Times Book Review, and it was almost unrecognizable. When he wrote for the Book Review, he did the best he could do be himself and be published in this prestigious book review section. But the Sam Kriss that has 30,000 plus followers is because he writes like nobody else. People like Justin Smith-Ruiu, he's written for Harper’s and all these places, but we don't talk about these places. We talk about the Substack. At one time, these voices could've been housed at popular but iconoclastic magazines. But now the industry is more risk-averse.

It's something I'm thinking about—in theory as you're closer to failure, you should take more risks, because you have less to lose. But in fact the most risk-taking comes in the heyday, when magazines are more flush. You'd think in a world where there's less to lose, those who run magazines and publishing imprints would throw caution to the wind. We'll just throw things about there, and maybe there'll be flops, but there'll be hits. But that's not the mentality, if you read a lot of review publications—I won't name names because they’re the competitors to The Metropolitan Review—but they're reviewing the same books as everyone else. Once in a while a review breaks out that's really interesting but negative, but mostly you're not surprised by these outlets. A lot of the writing is very dry and academic. A lot of the praise is very uniform. We know some of the books that come out there, there's a group-think around a certain novels. For a long time that would work, but now we're seeing the wheels coming off. Hollywood, record labels, we're seeing massive transition.

In the ‘60s, Hollywood transitioned to New Hollywood, the studios that got in on The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Last Picture Show—they won. The ones that couldn't get with the times and did westerns or 1950s style sentimental movies, they were out.

I think we're hitting a crossroads, you're either with it or you're not, and if you don't get it you're not going to have an audience.

Okay…I don’t exactly know your class background. But I know you went to Stonybrook. You didn’t go to Harvard. Just tell me a little about yourself. It just feels like most people who write for The New York Times and New York Magazine have a slightly different background than you do.

There's a large proportion of Ivy League and elite graduates writing for the Times, but New York is a little less gilded in that way.

Stonybrook is a good state school. A lot of striving—a lot of Asian kids from the suburbs. Ambitious Jewish kids from long island. Nobody who's fantastically wealthy or from a blue blood background goes to a SUNY.

I grew up very middle class. Both my parents worked for the federal government. I had a good upbringing. I wanted to—I wanted to go to Fordham—I wanted to stay in New York—and basically I was told, the financial aid didn't come through, which wasn't surprising in retrospect: a white middle-class kid with good, but not great grades, is not getting a financial aid package of any value. Stonybrook was like $5,000 a year. I was very middle-class.

There was a time when a lot more people like me were in media, when it was a lot healthier organization. Now, because there's a lot less jobs, it means those from elite universities have a real leg up. They really do. You have a better access to internships, those kinds of connections. If you went to Princeton and a Times editor went to school, visits your school—these things matter.

But the beauty of Substack is they don't matter here.

I would tell someone who's 22 years old today—try to get a media job if you can—but also cultivate your voice on Substack. You can do it, no matter where you went to school, you can get a following. Just think about your voice and your writing.

I had a strange high school experience where I went to a high school that was quite elite and private. I had a family member who was helping to pay for it. I was one of the few local Brooklyn kids. I was a fish out of water. The children of Meryl Streep and Jon Bon Giovi went to high school with me. And I went from there to a state school. And I got a master's in English from NYU, and I did that because I wanted to be a public school teacher. I briefly thought about a PhD, but I realized I had no facility for doctoral work. My very nice [master’s] thesis advisor basically said to me, "You're not going to a doctorate, right?", and when I said, “No,” she said "Okay that's nice" and she passed me.

The way wealth works now. It allows a lot of people to think they're middle class, so you can be from a family with a net worth in the millions and consider yourselves middle class. You have a lot of upper-upper-middle class people in media.

Whereas the media world used to have a lot of people who went to the sorts of schools that Donald Trump is not targeting for alleged antisemitism. You could go to a Ball State or something—solid schools, work your way up, go to a local paper, and maybe break out. That ladder is gone now, because the local papers are gone. That's why media is very coastal. Very elite. In the writing world, it's very hard to find genuinely working class people, writing novels, pursuing it, usually these people came from better families.

Philip Roth was the child of a low-ranking insurance salesman in New Jersey—working to middle-class. Got into Bucknell, which was a nice private school. Good school, but not Harvard. The ones who went to Harvard, like Mailer, he was not one of these old-line Harvard people. He was a jew who'd gotten good grades. Others, like Baldwin, did not go to college.

Carson McCullers and Truman Capote also didn’t really go to college. It was a different world, where qualifications just were not needed. Very few Americans went to college. People as a whole were less literate—there were fewer people who could read in the country—but at the same time there was this highly literate world. The way people used to speak, or to write in casual conversations—how public officials used to speak. I was reading a commencement address from Yale or Harvard in the 1910s, and it reads like Shakespeare. I listen to politicians a lot and I'm never impressed by them.

But nowadays language is taken less seriously by people. For instance, I'm reading a current novel, and it’s not very good, though I won’t tell you the name—these literary novels, if you're not going to be propelled by plot—you've got to have the language. But you read a lot of these novels, they're literary books, so they're not interested in plot the way a thriller might be. But the writing is not good enough to dispense with all those things. So you're left with a very middling novel that's not the worst thing you've ever read, and you kind of sleep-walk through it.

P.S. To purchase Glass Century click here [Amazon] or here [Bookshop]

Elsewhere on the Internet

• The Republic of Letters published my piece on the death of the literary short story:

  [T]he government, for some insane reason, subsidizes the production of literary short stories. The government not only employs the professors who write these stories, but it also often supports the periodicals where these stories get published.

  It is so comical that people look at the pathetic state of this officially-sanctioned art-form and conclude that readers are not interested in literature anymore. Or that we don't want to feel things. Or that we don't want to touch greatness.

Arc published my piece on whether or not Huckleberry Finn is still a classic. I pitched this piece to them six months ago, and it’s one of the things that kicked off my interest in 19th-century American literature. Due to the vagaries of magazine schedules, you’ve now read posts about all manner of classics—many of which posts have alluded to Huckleberry Finn—but have never read my take on the book itself.

Fifteen years later, I was in the process of writing a review of Percival Everett’s latest book, James, which has become the rare book that is a smash hit with both the critics and a large audience of readers. Since James is a playful riff on Huckleberry Finn, it seemed a dereliction of duty not to revisit Twain’s novel, however reluctantly. Given the dim view I took of Huckleberry Finn the last time I read it—and given the anti-racist politics of the intervening years—I thought, “Maybe by now Huckleberry Finn’s star has faded. Perhaps it’s not even a classic anymore.”

• My literary novel, The Default World, was published last summer, but it’s gotten a rash of recent reviews and mentions, by Mary Jane Eyre, Megan Milks, and Andrea Lawlor. Much praise, of course, but Alexander Sorodondo read the novel the best and most completely, I think:

  The Default World is genuinely hypnotic and propulsive and extremely offputting — not because its subject matter is disturbing but because…I kept reading passages in which the narrator acknowledges Jhanvi’s misfortune, or Jhanvi herself mentions her misfortune…and I couldn’t tell what the author was actually wanting me to think.

  The book wasn’t telling me how to read it, so I tried tapping into my loose familiarity with the novelist (the Substacker) to see what she would say…

  Was I imagining that Jhanvi is kind of a lowkey villain here? Or that she’s at least being corrupted by in the same way that her housemates are already corrupted — except she’s simply smarter than they are, weathered by real life, and consequently way better at corruption?