This is how my mother would have described the main characters, Mona and Saul, in this novel: “Terrible people in soul-sucking circumstances.”
I could have been a hugely sympathetic reader of this story. I was a young woman living in Manhattan in the 1970’s and 80’s. I lived with a guy who worked for the City and was as politically connected as Saul was. I knew women who played tennis and competed as viciously as Mona. (Tennis was very big in those days.) I wrote for the Village Voice. I knew a wide range of characters in the city at that time.
When I read the publisher’s description of this novel, I couldn’t wait to read it. Only a few pages in, I realized it was probably not for me. Nevertheless, I persisted, hoping I would be rewarded with a story that would win me over. It didn’t happen. I just never cared about how things would turn out for Mona and Saul. Then the ending just… ended.
The author seems to have a close working relationship with AI. Paragraphs were plopped in to tell (not show) about what was happening in NYC at a particular time. There was a *lot* of telling.
Here’s a “compare and contrast” exercise. Read Cynthia Weiner’s A Gorgeous Excitement. Set in the UES of the 1980's, this is gritty, realistic writing with unsympathetic characters. Yet we feel the empathy she has for them Also, Weiner didn’t have to rely on flat AI descriptions of the times and places. She was there. I was too. She got it right.
Here's a quip that’s as mean as those that are thrown around by the characters in this novel: This book is all ambition, no craft.

Thanks to Tough Poets Press and NetGalley for this ARC of 'Glass Century' by Ross Barkan.

This is the kind of book I really love. A big, sweeping novel that spans generations and presents the ever-changing New York City (and US) through the focus of a small and interconnected set of characters.

Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing through Covid and its aftermath in the early 2020s the narrative hangs on the extra-marital relationship between Mona and Saul and brings in a tight group of friends and family and the story is woven in around their professional and private lives and experiences. Although I didn't live there in the 70s I did live in NYC in the late 80s, 90s, and 2000s and I felt that the people, places, and experiences were really well drawn and believable.

The Twin Towers of the WTC are characters in their own right throughout the novel through their existence and then their absence and play a crucial role that you begin so see coming as the author teases the strands of the story together.

It's a very New York novel and, for me, that's always a good thing. I could see this being a superb streaming service series.

Congratulations to the publisher and author and, coming from a small independent press, I hope this book gets the attention it deserves.