GLASS CENTURY

Decades of New York City turmoil, filtered through one complicated family.

Barkan’s third novel centers on Mona Glass, Brooklynite, Jew, hotshot tennis player, and, as the story opens in the early 1970s, a fraud. She’s in love with Saul Plotz, the Queens borough director for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, but he’s already married; to appease (and deceive) her parents, the two stage their own wedding. Mona’s risk-taking extends to her career: At a friend’s urging, she takes a job as a photographer for an upstart tabloid, the Daily Raider, and snags an exclusive photo of Vengeance, a street vigilante who has both riled and thrilled New Yorkers. The novel, which stretches to the Covid-19 era, strives to be a widescreen, Franzen-esque study of the city’s crises as they entwine with Mona and Saul’s. Manhattan’s increasing wealth parallels the disintegration of Saul’s relationship with his unsuspecting wife, Felicia; the 9/11 attacks kill people close to both of them; a son Saul and Mona have together creates a further fracture in their relationship, and serves as a pathway to explore the city’s playground-for-the-wealthy callowness. Mona is a lively spitfire of a character—an excellent early set piece has her besting a smug man on the tennis court—and Barkan is a close student of New York history. (Early on, Saul takes a meeting with developer Fred Trump, attended by his teenage son, Donald.) The book feels overstuffed for its scope and at times predictable; it’s not hard to figure what will happen to the friends with jobs at the Twin Towers. And though a subplot about the extended life of Vengeance strains credulity, it provides some glue to the book’s everything-is-connected ethos. As Mona says: “Either everything in life is connected, or nothing is.”

An ambitious tale of an anxious 50 years in New York City history.