My Big Fat New York City Novel
'City On Fire,' 'The Emperor's Children,' 'Glass Century,' and the ups and downs of the big city social novel
Write what you know. We’ve all heard this maxim before. Some find it empowering because it gives importance to their personal experiences. Others find it confining, and even frightening if they fear censure for encroaching on others’ narrative territories.
Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, I was under the impression that meaningful novels had to be these big fat things: loaded with grand ideas and multiple perspectives, preferably set in a big city. Focus on just one viewpoint? It better be about the most interesting and important character ever. God forbid the writer use “I.” What a frivolous narcissist.
Things have changed recently, however. As
notes: “Literary agent told me teens can't read third person omniscient anymore.”1 I understand the appeal of first-person perspectives. They’re like a voyeuristic literary VR experience. All the better if the perspective is a titillating one. I prefer it for my own fiction.However, something is lost when fiction turns too insular. There’s the danger that literature becomes less about art and more about validation of one’s self. This is especially true in literary fiction, where fanciful plots and characters are frowned upon. Thus, the war in literary fiction about who gets to write it often becomes one about which group’s personal problems are worthier than those of others.
The recent publication of Ross Barkan’s novel Glass Century, which is something of a throwback to the city novel that was more in vogue a couple of decades ago, compelled me to think more about the strengths of weaknesses of this type of narrative.
My own writing preferences aside regarding first and third person, there’s something very worthwhile in valourizing the writing of perspectives not our own. There’s a whole school of thought that believes the novels are valuable because they can teach people empathy by reading others’ points of view. That reduces the art form to mere fables, but if such empathy can be gained as a side effect, that’s certainly an upside. But why only the focus on one side of the equation? What about learning empathy by writing from, and not just reading, others’ perspectives?
City On Fire
I remember when Garth Hallberg Risk’s City On Fire was the major literary event of 2015. That he received a $2 million advance for it—and that the novel was not very good2—makes City On Fire a useful breaking point, where elite literary attitudes shifted.
One thing I’ve come to enjoy about writing my Substack is that it motivates me to read books I wouldn’t have otherwise, like City On Fire. While I didn’t like it, but I’m still glad I read this tome (almost a thousand pages!) because the novel helpfully embodies many of the pitfalls of the big-idea novel with multiple perspectives. If City On Fire did indeed kill the cultural appetite for type of book, I can see why.
The story is set in the late 1970s in New York City, with various classes, races, sexualities, professions, and ages represented in its main cast of 10+ characters. Centered on the shooting of a girl in Central Park, City On Fire wants to say a lot about the NYC upper class, punk rock, urban blight, corporate takeovers, gentrification, gay acceptance, being children of immigrants, marital infidelity, race relations, family duty, the state of law enforcement and journalism, and more.
Such ambition and breadth can be admired, but with such a large group of main characters, a novel runs the risk of its many voices losing distinctness. This is painfully evident in City On Fire because of Hallberg’s tendency to strain for the seemingly poetic. In one scene, Mercer Goodman (a gay black schoolteacher in his mid-20s) is in his white lover’s family penthouse, and as Mercer is gazing out the window, he makes this observation:
The view was godlike, cinematic: the City as he’d dreamed it from his homely hometown seven hundred miles away. Resolving out of the snow, like a picture tuned in on a television, were crenellated apartment buildings, yellow windows punched out of the darkness, powdered sugar shaking down over the layer-cake hotels down on Central Park South.
Since Mercer is an English teacher, it does make sense that his inner monologue would consist of words like “crenellated” and fanciful descriptions of scenery. But in another chapter, Charlie Weisberger—a suburban high school boy with no flair for literature or academics—has thoughts that read exactly like those of Mercer:
Power transformers tilted up like weary crucifixes, shot through with rust and ice on the far side of a window he could see through only imperfectly, as he could remember the night only imperfectly.
Maybe the narration belongs to neither Mercer nor Charlie, and instead to the narrator who is simply describing scenes in his own idiosyncratic manner. But that’s not true either, because in a later Charlie chapter, another main character, Keith Lamplighter—a philandering jock-husband who cheats on the dutiful heiress Regan Hamilton-Sweeney with teenage manic pixie dream punk-girl, Samantha Cicciaro, who is also the object of Charlie’s infatuation—is momentary referred to as “the Asshole.” The reason is clear: because Keith has turned Charlie in to the police.
So, in fact, the narration does reflect the mind of its characters. This is shown again in a chapter from the perspective of Larry Pulaski, a retirement-age detective, in which the terms “Negro” and “Oriental” are used in reference to Mercer and a young Asian American gallerist named Jenny Nguyen.
So the narration does embody the relevant character of the chapter, except during times when Hallberg wants to go off on a rhetorical flourish. If these moments were merely ineffective (readers know what a snowcapped NYC building looks like, so what does it add to compare it to a cake, unless it’s to hint that Mercer has an eating disorder?), then they’d merely be annoying as prime examples of what
characterizes as “laminated writing:”34Laminated language is prose that is self-consciously trying to dazzle with its own brilliance. A lot of contemporary fiction is laminated in this way, especially—ironically—the contemporary fiction praised as lyrical.
But these indulgences break the flow of the story to detrimentally bring attention to the writer himself, which only reminds the reader that the characters themselves are little more than archetypes.
Recognizable archetypes are not inherently a problem if they are just a starting point from which characters can develop. But with such a large cast to juggle, Hallberg can build neither momentum nor investment with any one of them. Why do we care that Sam gets shot in Central Park? Why do we have to listen to punk rocker/pseudo-philosopher/terrorist Nicky Chaos—a prototype of a MySpace ephebophile—blather on yet again while stoned about Post-Humanism?
If I may go on a momentary tangent… Near the end of Final Fantasy VI, you’re forced to use all characters in your party—yes, even the weak and worthless benchwarmers you didn’t even bother to XP-grind and level up—as you slog your way to the final boss fight. I never finished that game because of this.
Similarly, towards the end of City On Fire, all the characters’ paths converge on a single night: the NYC summer blackout of 1977. Hallberg likely meant for this to be a riveting and chaotic finish that sparks many a-ha moments as readers connect the meticulously placed dots from previous chapters. However, the actual result is a crash-and-burn disaster of a narrative setpiece where too many characters are moved around over too many pages. All sense of urgency is lost until the reader is left wondering whether the blackout lasted 25 hours or 25 days.
One of the unintentionally funniest moments in the novel also unfortunately occurs during the climactic blackout. When Jenny and Mercer are trying to stop Nicky Chaos’ evil plan, she ends up running over a stranger. She then abandons her mission to take him to the hospital. After the overwhelmed hospital turns him away, she walks him home. Amidst the imminent threat of Nicky Chaos bombing half of Manhattan, an excruciatingly overwritten sex scene unfolds, which includes this gem: “For a second, her white underpants burn like a candle in the dark.” Sounds like a UTI.
The Emperor’s Children
But this type of novel doesn’t always fail because it’s overstuffed. It can also underwhelm because it feels claustrophobic and empty. When I was younger, I often saw The Emperor’s Children (published in 2006) prominently displayed both in real-life bookstores and in online shops. It has a beautiful cover, hinting at something of a metropolitan fairy tale with the castle-like Beresford on its cover. From the cover alone, I could tell it was supposed to be an important novel. I read it a few years ago and hated it, but in a memorable way. Now, I finally have an excuse to write about it!
The Emperor’s Children revolves around the Thwaite family, a wealthy and influential NYC family. Murray Thwaite is a revered journalist and public intellectual, almost a pop cultural icon. Like a Thomas Friedman, but worse. His daughter, Marina, is a beautiful socialite who yearns to have the gravitas of her father. We are also invited into the heads of other characters like Murray’s nephew, Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, a college drop-out who moves to NYC in order to ingratiate himself with the great Murray Thwaite. Meanwhile, an Australian media upstart named Ludovic Seeley has it out for Murray and seeks to destroy him (while also pursuing Marina romantically). There are also Marina’s best friends from college, Danielle Minkoff (a filmmaker who’s tired of living in Marina’s shadow) and Julius Clarke (a gay man afraid of commitment and ambition).
The novel’s critical weakness is its dependence on Murray as a heliocentric figure, yet never successfully establishing why he deserves that position. The book is much more proficient at depicting him as a creep, like when he hits on Danielle in front of Marina:
“Mr. Thwaite.” [Danielle] extended a hand and leaned forward at once, and he both clasped her fingers and kissed her cheek—with, she felt again, an undue and possibly meaningful pressure. “Marina, you look gorgeous.”
“Doesn’t she always?” said Murray, with an indulgence that seemed more than paternal. “You’re looking rather fetching yourself.”
“I made her get the dress, Daddy,” Marina slid an arm around Danielle’s shoulder. “Doesn’t it look great?”
Murray Thwaite smiled again.
“She wasn’t even going to try it on. I took one look at it in the store and said, you’ve got to have the boobs for it, and Danny’s got the boobs. Didn’t I say that, Danny?”
“Mind, Marina—I think your friend is turning the color of her dress.” He fixed his eye on Danielle. “But she isn’t wrong, you know.”
What is this, a daddy-daughter pair of pimps? But when you’re a star, they let you get away with it. And what a star Murray is, so much so that entire careers can be made by gaining his favour. Or by tearing him down, like how Seeley plans to revolutionize media with his new magazine by attacking Murray. But what will the revolution be about? How will smearing Murray accomplish this? None of this is made clear.
Is this commentary on how shallow the NYC upper-class intelligentsia is? That Murray is indeed an empty suit who spouts banal yet seemingly complicated opinions that let mediocre minds feel smart? Is Murray obscenely good at office politics? Is Murray just really hot? He does have an affair with Danielle, after all. We don’t know because we don’t know Murray.
Bootie is another empty and forced character, designed to be a fascinating figure from depressed upstate NYC who finagles his way into NYC elite society via his raw intellect (certainly not with his charm given his terrible hygiene and social awkwardness). But other than carrying around books by Tolstoy and Emerson, there’s no evidence of his distinguishing intellect. Off-putting young men who overestimate their intelligence are hardly a rare specimen, so it’s laughable when Marina suggests to Danielle, a filmmaker, that Bootie should be a subject of Danielle’s documentary. “An Autodidact in New York,” Marina suggests for a title. Bootie is not Ramanujan; he’s just a nerdy fat guy5 who thinks he’s too good for state school.
After 9/11 happens, Bootie is presumed to be dead. Danielle is bizarrely distraught over his death, and she says that unlike the rest of their wretchedly privileged clique, Bootie embodied gravitas, ambition, and integrity. It could be that Messud is trying to show how physically and mentally crippling 9/11 was on those who lived through it. But given how one of the final lines describing Bootie—now pursuing a new life under a new identity in Florida—says how “he would bide his time and rise from the ashes, like the phoenix, more powerful than before,” it’s obvious that we are meant to root for Bootie as a misunderstood creature.
The hollowness of two most important characters in The Emperor’s Children—Murray and Bootie—undermines the whole story because it means the novel is making commentary on a world it does not know. Or more precisely, a world it cannot portray with any detail or insight. This is a little confusing because from Messud’s biography, the world of this novel seems like one she should know very well. The Thwaites’ universe feels more like a dollhouse than anything resembling real life, and as a result, most of the novel’s commentary cannot be taken seriously.
Glass Century
Glass Century also has many things it wants to say about the politics and culture of New York City (Barkan is, among many other things, one of the foremost New York political journalists). But where novels like City On Fire and The Emperor’s Children fail in this endeavour by overextending themselves on scale and/or failing to bring its world to life, Glass Century succeeds by focusing on its characters and through them, allowing the readers to get a sense of their surrounding historical and cultural forces. So when the greatest hits of modern NYC history—Trump, fiscal crisis, the building and destruction of the World Trade Centers, and COVID—roll around, they support the story and characters, not the other way around.
The novel follows the relationship between Mona Glass and Saul Plotz, a Jewish American couple in New York City, from the 1970s to the start of the 2020s. They meet in the classroom, where he teaches a university class she’s in. He’s a decade older, married, and with children. The novel alternates between their points of view, as well as those of their children.
Mona is especially a compelling character because it is not easy to classify her as either a triumphant iconoclast or a tragic victim of her times. Her traditionalist Jewish family wants her to aspire to be the beautiful and domestic wife of a respectable Jewish man. But instead, she pursues her own path where she becomes a respected photojournalist and a local tennis hero. She also eschews marriage, going so far as to stage a show wedding with Saul in order to placate her parents.
But Mona is more than just a symbolic thumbed-nose at convention, and her unfolding life story shows both the possibilities and limitations of her changing society. This is best exemplified in the single most thrilling and kinetic scene in the novel, in which she challenges an arrogant male tennis player at her local courts. Initially disadvantaged by her self-doubts and his overpowering serves, she soon susses out his weakness:
Alec was used to either blowing players off the court or wielding his superior technique against them, serving and volleying like the elegant grass court player he probably wanted to be.
Alec didn’t like the long rallies.
Soon enough, she has him scrambling all over the court. The crowd, both male and female, is fully behind her as they witness their own little Battle of the Sexes. She wins via TKO as Alec lamely quits, citing a fake injury.
Yet this type of small victory becomes a recurrent pattern in her life, in which even a win only highlights what might’ve been. As a woman born to lower-class parents who couldn’t afford her childhood lessons, Mona never has a chance to even dream of a professional tennis career. She has to satisfy herself with winning local tournaments until her body eventually breaks down.
Her photojournalism career, which she only stumbles into because she loses her government job during NYC’s 70s fiscal crisis, is similarly limited. She is able to break into the industry because a new tabloidy upstart publication, The Daily Raider, is desperate for anybody with the energy (and driver’s license) to photograph the seediest of crime scenes. With her friend Al, she outhustles everyone to capture the image of Vengeance, a masked vigilante. This gives her a long career, but without the right pedigree and connections, she is unable to ascend much higher before changes to the media landscape, as well as her personal life, oblige her to seek another line of work.
Her unconventional relationship with Saul most effectively illustrates the contradictions of Mona’s life. Her refusal to marry can be seen as an act of liberating rebellion from both her family and society’s expectations of her as a woman. The show wedding at the beginning of novel even has the air of a glorious prank, filled to the brim with youthful irreverence:
When Mona told Liv the plan she and Saul eventually cooked up, Liv squealed with delight. Al thought it was funny too, especially how she was going to marry someone who was already married with two children, living in a house in Nassau County. They both relished absurdities. It would be another adventure, especially since Saul was fronting the costs. It was Liv who suggested Hank Lefkowitz to play rabbi. . . . Hank was their only friend who knew any Hebrew, thanks to the few years he spent at a yeshiva, and his black tortoise-shell glasses created the impression of great scholarly depth, though he primarily spent his time getting high in the upper deck at Shea Stadium and may have read one or two books, cover-to-cover, in his life.
But does Mona’s need to push back against family pressure lead her to the other extreme, where she lets Saul get away with too much? It’s not as if she’s slavishly devoted to Saul, and at one point, she gets into a brief relationship with Al. When Saul finds out and becomes irate, Mona coolly tells him that he doesn’t own her. And when Al proposes to her, she rejects him, claiming that she doesn’t want to marry anybody. Yet, she acknowledges:
It was Saul. Always Saul. If she had to explain it to Al in a way that would enrage him most, she would say that she could not marry him because this would make it harder for her to see Saul Plotz, the older man with the other family he would never leave for her.
Mona is not some forlorn Other Woman, and she does indeed relish her independent lifestyle. Even when she becomes unexpectedly pregnant with Saul’s child, she decides against terminating the pregnancy and ably raises Emmanuel as a single mother. But little indignities remain, like how her son has to have different last names (he is a Plotz in public school, but a Glass in Hebrew school due to Jewish custom). There are also financial difficulties in raising a son by herself, which leads her to ask her older, disapproving sister for help. By the time Mona is elderly, the little deficits have added up.
Glass Century’s weakest point is when it shifts to the perspective of Tad, who is Saul and his wife Felicia’s son. After learning of his father’s infidelity, Tad spirals out of control, wandering the country aimlessly until he ends up being employed by the man who turns out to have been the original Vengeance. Tad then becomes Vengeance’s successor, at least for a little while. Tad’s difficult life is useful in showing the consequences of Saul’s decisions, but his superheroic turn, even if brief and ineffectual, was a little hard to believe and reminded me a bit too much of the precious comic-book obsessions of the likes of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem6.
As for Saul, he ultimately ends up a man beset by his own warped sense of duty. He loves Mona, especially her single-minded ways. But he also feels obligated to stay with his wife for the sake of his family. Several times, he pledges to Mona that he wants to marry her, that he’s finally willing to leave his wife for her. But he also likely knows Mona will always refuse, partly out of pride and also out of guilt. So he is able to maintain his double life, even though he still neglects his family. Towards the later stage of his life, he has a revelation, reminiscent of that of Mr. Stevens in The Remains of the Day:
What he should have done, the minute he saw her in that college classroom, was blow up his life. He could have done it. What was he, thirty? But God damn it, he imagined himself so old, his choices so calcified, his destiny with Felicia the straitjacket he would never throw off. Mona had to be his furtive wonder. Invented work trips that were just aimless days in Brooklyn, ambling in the park, ordering Chinese take-out. Why did he think that was enough? Why was he driving back to Long Island all those other nights? Why didn’t he slam his fist down on the table and declare, yes, I will get a divorce? Because once he did—once he showed real fucking initiative—Mona would have welcomed his choice. Eventually, she would have.
Instead of clinging to youth, Saul clings to the exact opposite, far too prematurely. For the rest of his remaining life, he is doomed to regret that he never fully took charge of his own life. And for that, others have paid the price. And so has he.
It is Glass Century’s adept telling of these types of quiet, sometimes even morally ambiguous, triumphs and tragedies that allow it to make social commentary without coming off as preachy, and depict major historical events without being Forrest Gumpian. It’s a wonderful, readable-yet-complex novel that especially appealed to me because my parents are of Mona and Saul’s age. As I once told Barkan: “Glass Century is like a Jonathan Lethem book, but one that I actually liked.”
On Lamination by Courtney Sender | The Craft Lab for Writers
Sender also says that the opposite of lamination is “permeable prose,” which she defines as writing that pulls her into the story without her even noticing. Another novel that I wanted to include in this piece was A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara, which I was beginning to re-read but accidentally left in Korea as I was returning to the US last week. City On Fire had taken up too much time anyway. So I want to at least dedicate a footnote to A Little Life and say that against all expectations, I greatly enjoyed it. And this was a book I’d wanted to hate! But the permeability of its writing was undeniable, and I must admire any novel that can do that, especially when it’s a tome.
Messud has a hilarious fixation on Bootie’s weight. Some examples: “pale and generous bellly,” “Fat Freddie,” “saturnine in his plumpness,” “the chubby guy with the glasses,” and “fat naked fuck.” When Murray and Bootie have a falling out, Murray tells the kid that at least he was never fat.
I tried reading The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem for this piece, but I stopped after about 90 pages. I read Motherless Brooklyn many years and hated it. Was I being unfair to Lethem, to judge him by just one novel? So I gave what is supposed to be his magnum opus a shot. I can now safely conclude: I hate Jonathan Lethem (as a writer). Skully and stickball seem like fun little games. But I do not want to read pages upon pages about them.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone hating Lethem so violently before! I’d be fascinated to know why
The problem with City on Fire is that it was boring.