Weekly Readings #169 (04/28/25-05/04/25)

traverse the fire

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

I hope my metropolitan readers will join me on May 8, when I’ll be appearing alongside Barkan, Gasda, and Taranto at “A Night of New Literature,” hosted by the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. That is—so far—the last stop on my two-stop book tour to support my newly published novel, Major Arcana, which you can order here and wherever else books are sold online. More interviews and reviews will be forthcoming, and I’ll link them here in future posts.

In the meantime, the novel makes its way in the world. A reader on Instagram says, “I think about it when I’m not reading, simultaneously enchanted and a bit repulsed,” an uncanny anticipation of what the novel’s real protagonist (Ash del Greco, not Simon Magnus) observes late in the book: disgust must accompany desire. On Goodreads, another reader judges it “[e]ngaging, thought-provoking, full of character and characters.” And on Substack Notes, this:

Speaking of literary criticism and food preparation, I turn now to a more contentious review of Major Arcana. Regular readers know I love a good hatchet job. Social media and other platforms have disturbed our longstanding authorial custom about how to handle a bad notice, however. Custom says, “You endure it in polite silence,” no matter the misrepresentations or ulterior motives. But we are incentivized to overreact to everything online; studied silence itself will be dismissed as petulant avoidance, no less petulant, really, than a peevish reply. “If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” but the only real way to lose on the internet is to say nothing. One doesn’t want to go as far as the novelist who famously stalked her Goodreads critic a decade ago, or, to cite the antics of the more recent and more established, as the novelist’s husband who found himself in a social-media contretemps with a critic who gave his wife a bad review, this after the critic in question had responded in his capacity as novelist to his own mixed review by publicly blasting “the underlying racism, classism, and homophobia” he saw as informing his critic. (Naomi covered that episode in discussing the dilemma of the badly reviewed and the internet-era temptation toward “demagoguery.”)

To the point: Compact’s departing critic uses the real or imputed faults of Major Arcana to condemn this whole corner of the literary world, and apparently also all small-press novelists, as a gaggle of functional illiterates and uppity amateurs. Major Arcana is in the end, however, and despite its platform provenance, a traditionally published novel written by an author with a fair amount of academic credentials, so it makes a pretty poor example of outsider art or “rebellion literature.” No doubt I should have blotted a thousand lines, but as far as I’m concerned the rest of you are absolved for my many sins of taste and grammar.¹ I was amused, nevertheless, by our fastidious grammarian’s portrait of me as some kind of chimpanzee who had been taught, albeit badly, to type. (“Back to the shop, Mr. John!” I quote—demagogically, of course.) For the sake of transparency, here is a long anti-blurb from behind Compact’s redoubtable paywall:²

Pistelli has some interesting ideas—the emphasis on the occult is a rich direction; and I also thought he navigated the post-woke moment deftly, without being didactic about it. But ideas can’t fully form without careful execution on the prose level. And that is what this book lacks.

Here’s the first paragraph:

He pulled the revolver from his army jacket. That was the first strange thing bystanders reported witnessing before they saw the gun: the olive drab World War II “Ike” jacket with its large front pockets and gold insignia on the lapel. Oversized, it hung oddly, unbuttoned, over his t-shirt and jeans.

A rigorous editor might observe that the pronoun “That” in the second sentence could refer either to the army jacket or to the entire first sentence, with the whole sentence being the more natural expectation, since pulling a gun is “strange” and an army jacket is not. The reader stumbles and has to read the sentence again. Moving forward, the verb choice for the gerund in the phrase “bystanders reported witnessing [the jacket]” is slightly off—you might have noticed a jacket, but before you saw the gun you weren’t “witnessing” it.

We could go on. A reader picturing an army jacket has likely already pictured “large front pockets” and perhaps even “gold insignia,” making the description seem unnecessary. The concluding sentence, starting with, “Oversized, it hung oddly, unbuttoned” puffs something up out of nothing. Is there anything odd about the way an unbuttoned army jacket could hang? Have any of us ever seen that? The guy is not later revealed to be a hunchback. Maybe the suggestion is that there’s a gun in the pocket, but the gun is later described as small, and again, who has looked around noticing askew clothing because people have things in their pockets?

I could red-pencil many other paragraphs in Major Arcana with similar results, but the problem is larger. The incident with the gun introduces some interesting themes: The young man in the army jacket is a college student, and he kills himself on campus while his girlfriend films it on her phone. In the next section, one of the young man’s professors, a comic-book writer named Simon Magnus, who is the book’s real protagonist, is subjected to an academic witch hunt for being a bad influence on his student. But Pistelli follows this up with two sections of backstory. Half of Part One introduces the suicide’s mother and tells us all about her childhood and personal history. Part Two recounts the significant events in Magnus’s life up until that point, including the childhood histories of Magnus, his ex-girlfriends, and all the other characters who will eventually be relevant to the suicide.

Some of this has potential, but it’s structured all wrong. Backstory is not plot. Pistelli says he is influenced by the classics, but he seems not to have a sense of how classic novels move their plots forward. Of course, he has also said he’s influenced by the great modernists, but an inciting incident plus 184 pages³ of backstory isn’t the structure of a radical modernist novel either. It’s just amateurish.⁴

I hate to pick on Pistelli, because Major Arcana is still better than many novels being published by small presses. I have a pile of hyped galleys sitting next to me, and the prose is downright bad in all but one of them (which, actually, turns out to be from Penguin).⁵ This doesn’t mean that these writers don’t have potential; I think the rebellion-lit folks do have more ideas and more vision than the mainstream. Pistelli has some nice turns of phrase, if he could sift them out and identify them.

Mea culpa, if the charges stick. And even if they don’t, the ever-unreadable Critique of Judgment notwithstanding, “de gustibus” still obtains. But for the sake of accurate literary history—two can play pedant, I’m afraid—and since our critic derides the concept in general rather than my particular execution, I will observe here only that the novel’s “inciting incident plus [many] pages of backstory” organization was not an infantine blunder but my probably too-knowing tribute to a pair of key precursors, Alan Moore’s Watchmen (the paradigm of the Dark Age superhero narrative) and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (the last serious American novel to make high art out of the New Age), both of which “radical modernist” masterpieces boast exactly that structure, and neither of which was itself conceived by an amateur. Which does not mean, I grant, that I prepared the dish as tastefully as they did, just that the recipe was worth following. Aside from that, “we cannot spend the day in explanation,” nor in the sad disadvantage of replying to the critic.

Apropos of nothing, I quote Marcel Proust from Swann’s Way in Moncrieff’s translation:

We are very slow in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which is labelled ‘great talent’ in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent.

You probably already knew that quotation, but you didn’t learn it from me. I was unfortunately unable to release the scheduled first of two episodes on Proust this week for The Invisible College (my series of literature courses for paid subscribers) due to the long blackout that afflicted Western Pennsylvania in the wake of severe storms.⁶ To stay on schedule, I plan to release a single Proust episode—with his extravagantly labyrinthine sentences, he lends himself to a more summary approach anyway—sometime next week, allowing for interstate travel. After that delay, we will be back on track. Following Proust, we have three more subjects in spring’s modern western world literature sequence (Rilke, Kafka, Borges) before a summer of Shakespeare and Milton and an autumn of great American novelists from James and Wharton to DeLillo and Morrison. Thanks to all my paid subscribers! If you’re wondering about whether or not to join us, you might peruse the growing archive of over 60 episodes, all two hours or more, on major authors from Homer to Joyce.

For today, not a review, but a few thoughts occasioned by Ross Barkan’s Glass Century and the worlds it emerged from. Please enjoy!

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Towers of Glass: Glass Century and the Individual in History

But before we get there, let us frame the problem properly, for my writing about this book at all is a problem. We read of a burgeoning and understandable “resentment…against Substack novelists.” Why resentment, why understandable? Because everyone active on Substack is a writer as well as a reader, and therefore must look upon everyone else on Substack as a rival. As Gore Vidal is supposed to have said, “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” And if you don’t even succeed? I spent two decades not succeeding, and I can tell you it breeds resentment, against blue-checks, orange-checks, and checks of all kinds. Worse than this, nothing that looks like success from the outside feels like success on the inside. Do our billionaires and celebrities seem to have been satisfied by their ascent? The president wants to be the pope. Desire by its nature is bottomless; there’s always another source of anxiety; and no matter what you do have, there’s always something else you don’t. Immortality, for one thing.

Ideally, art can minister to this unhappy but universal vastation. But materially, art has to be both created and received by people, which means it is rotted from the inside by the canker it was always meant to treat by reminding us of the astonishing unlikeliness that we draw breath at all.⁷ Art’s corruption by our tangle of fears and desires has likely existed since one cave-painter looked askance on another’s more celebrated but less accomplished daubing of the bison hunt, but modernity and postmodernity’s changed conditions of production and consumption—the universalization of art begun by print culture and accelerated to infinity by “online”—has made it impossible to ignore. The postmodern critique of art, which I sometimes complain about under the rubric of “sociology,” took these technological changes and their disclosures of aesthetic inequity as its object, and was not wrong to do so. And yet, mired as we are in resentment and envy and self-hatred, we can’t stop making art. If we could, we would, and, so far, we haven’t.

I am always acclaiming “Bernhard’s Way” by Michael W. Clune as this century’s most important essay in literary theory, even though I don’t especially care for Bernhard and am not familiar with the controversial critic, memoirist, and soon-to-be novelist Clune’s other work. This is our most important essay because Clune answers the question of what to do after the postmodern critique of art, after the knowledge that we create (and criticize) art partly out of our will to power, our sweaty, desperate demand to be recognized. Clune answers the question in the only persuasive way I know short of Girard’s unworkable recommendation that we all convert to a single (if extensive) Christian sect:

What would a commitment to art that has passed through the postmodern critique of art look like? The recent return to aesthetics has largely proceeded by either denying or ignoring this critique. Pierre Bourdieu presents the postmodern case in perhaps its most elegantly distilled form. The tradition declares art is about experience; actually it is about status. The tradition declares great art is timeless; actually its motives, meanings, and effects are circumscribed by the conditions of its production. The tradition declares the value of art is produced by formal relations within the work; actually it is produced by social relations between antagonistic groups.

[…]

Bernhard agrees with critics like Bourdieu in denouncing art’s covert parasitism on the networks of social status. But he disagrees about what to do. Bourdieu wants to jettison the ideal of the aesthetic as disinterested attention to form. This might annihilate some forms of snobbery. But it is hard to imagine that settling accounts with Kant will do much to change the social world’s basic nature as a hierarchy founded on fear and pain. Bernhard, with a deep understanding of how art has been infected by the social relations described by postmodern critics, reacts more rationally. Don’t get rid of art; get rid of social relations.

The satisfaction of the highest art for Bernhard thus defines a human space both replete with value and outside society. In this it does not look so different from the Kantian ideal of aesthetic experience. But there is a crucial difference. For Bernhard, accepting the truth of the postmodern critique means accepting that every relation between an artwork and an audience becomes enmeshed in status relations. Bernhard faces the consequences squarely. The “real satisfaction” of art can never be achieved by the audience of a work, but only and solely by its creator.

That sounds like a feeble solution only in a world where we aren’t all creators, but now we all are, at least everyone who has convened in this troublous space. And so the work has to be done for its own sake or not at all. Recognition will come or it won’t, in time for our life or after our death, from people we respect or people we don’t, but it’s worth doing solely because we are transformed in the process of doing it, compelled by forces irrupting from somewhere outside the world we know. Ross Barkan calls this compulsion “the rotor”:

There’s something else too, another trick native to me, a soft anxiety that helps me write. It causes a mild distress that is alleviated by the act of writing. It’s what precedes my pen to paper, my fingers tittering on the keyboard. I think of it as the rotor. It’s the unseen turning inside of me, the need to produce. The rotor whirs.

In the quoted essay, Barkan contrasts this unabating literary compulsion with a fatal hesitancy in his athletic pursuits. But in his new novel Glass Century, which is refreshingly not about artists of any sort, the heroine’s athletic drive stands in for the rotor in its lifelong conflict with the counter-machine of time and history, the force that will grind us all to dust in the end. We are introduced to her in motion, and, without spoiling the plot, I can say that we leave her in motion as well, a furious internal motion she pits against the extrinsic force of death:

Here was Mona Glass.

Down the hallway and out of the dark, she was running because she always ran, her legs wired with muscle, her elbows firing with polished violence. Even though this was the night before what was supposed to be the most important day, she was wearing frayed Pumas, the same that glided across tennis courts and gym floors, one lace licking the beige carpeting. She ran because she could, because she was still twenty-four, and if she was going to be late, she couldn’t blame the speed she was gathering.

This formidable Mona Glass (she eventually becomes a lauded photojournalist) and her unorthodox family—she is in a decades-long sham marriage to an already married New York State bureaucrat named Saul Plotz, with whom she has a troubled child—are the novel’s heroes, but its villain is nothing less than history.

Narrating the lives of Mona, Saul, and their friends and family from the 1970s to the 2020s, Barkan allows the calamities of our age to stalk his characters, unbeknownst to them. The sublimely mortifying effect is akin to that enjoyed by the Greek tragedians, whose audience already knew the myths the heroes were trapped in. We read the novel with mounting dread as 9/11, the pandemic, and other horrors bear down on the unwary; we are suddenly made to feel in our bones that we are also a day or an hour away from world-historical catastrophe. Barkan offers a unique use of the novelist’s art perfectly suited to our anxious moment.

Glass Century obviously owes something to DeLillo, not just in its richly evoked New York setting and anxiously political subject matter, but especially in its stylistic use of a kind of staccato recitation of its characters’ existences in time, an evocation of what it feels like for the vulnerable self to be stretched along a death-tending continuum it can’t control. This is an aesthetic commitment also shared by Virginia Woolf, another of Barkan’s cited and evident influences, and she has always struck me as having much in common with DeLillo, as unlikely a pair as the Bloomsbury mandarin and the Bronx plebeian may make. Because Barkan focuses so relentlessly on the inner life, on how history moves inward to be abraded against the rotor, and not on any exposition that cedes authority to history and society, DeLillo and Woolf seem the more relevant reference points than the chroniclers Balzac and Tolstoy, as cited by other reviewers.

Historical figures flit in and out of Glass Century—Moses, Trump,⁸ Giuliani, Bush—cut down to size by reminders that for all their power they are also subject to the same existential process everybody else is. (That is a Tolstoyan gesture.) Perhaps more controversially, a subplot derived from the superhero tradition⁹ concerns a masked vigilante who begins stalking the crime-ridden streets of the 1970s and resumes the mantle after 9/11; I found this experiment in mixing genres mostly plausible, even eloquent and suspenseful, though the heightened Alan Moore-like rhetoric in these scenes slightly conflicts with the prevailing demotic atmosphere of “literary fiction.” Jewish identity, and its attenuation from the Silents to the Boomers to the Millennials, is also a rich motif, another illustration of how history dissolves collective as well as individual identity.¹⁰

The many meanings of the title gather to an elegy for the promise once held by the American century, and perhaps also a Millennial elegy for our parents’ flawed but vital Boomer generation, a promise and a vitality not all the “great again” slogans can possibly restore to their full postwar potential:

As a child, he imagined his middle age would be spent on Mars or on one of Jupiter’s moons, the old inadequacies of Earth-life excised for good. If the planets couldn’t promise utopia, they offered advancement—existence formulated without the burden of history, laws and technology borne from computer-fired logic, not the sins of flesh-genocide. As an old man, that was where he believed he would be. There would be towering cities of glass.

Perhaps rebuilding the novel is as vain a dream as rebuilding the Twin Towers. In the miserable, miserly world of social relations, Ross Barkan praised Major Arcana so that I would praise Glass Century, and I am praising Glass Century because Ross Barkan praised Major Arcana. Understood more generously, however, we see something akin in our very divergent projects, and akin in many other and even more heterogeneous books of our milieu: some nascent desire across every barrier of sensibility and subject matter, every division of taste, to make the novel adequate again to the force opposing it, to awaken from the nightmare of history into the life of art.

This everlasting fallacy (see Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial) has been formulated and recommended by Flaubert in the following sentence: “Correction (in the highest sense of the word) does to thinking what the waters of the Styx did to Achilles’ body, that is, makes it invulnerable and indestructible (Correspondence II, 199). His judgment is conclusive, but I personally have not experienced any confirmation. (I suppress the tonic virtues of the Styx, an infernal reference used for emphasis, not argument.) The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the “perfect” page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process. One cannot with impunity alter any line fabricated by Góngora (according to those who restore his texts), but Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives every careless version. Heine, who never heard it read in Spanish, proclaimed it for eternity. The German, Scandinavian, or Hindu ghost of the Quixote is more alive than the stylist’s anxious verbal artifices.

I would not wish that the moral of this assertion be understood as desperation or nihilism. Nor do I wish to foment negligence, nor do I believe in a mystical virtue of the awkward locution and the shoddy epithet. I am stating that the voluntary emission of those two or three minor pleasures—the ocular distraction of metaphor, the auditory distraction of rhythm, and the surprises of an interjection or a hyperbaton—usually proves that the writer’s overriding passion is his subject, and that is all.

1. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader,” trans. Suzanne Jill Levine

2. We should make anti-blurbs a common practice. I was sad Arcade didn’t put Michiko Kakutani’s pan on the back cover of the Dead Stars reissue, as quoted in my Bruce Wagner essay: “Stomach-turning, sick-making, rancid, repugnant, repellent, squalid, odious, fetid, disgusting.” My favorite is James Wood on Ishiguro’s now-classic The Unconsoled: “It invents its own category of badness.” We should all be so inventive.

3. I bring no accusation, but Major Arcana is 349 pages long, not 184, and I can’t help but observe that our reviewer has halted her summary at Part Two of a four-part novel while slightly mischaracterizing its overall structure (Simon Magnus is not the “real protagonist,” unless one is determined to perform some kind of against-the-grain reading). In the critic’s defense, one doesn’t need to eat the whole cutlet to know it’s underdone—and yet, literature is not quite a culinary art, is it? The period grants the sentence meaning. Which is the meaning, if you’ll permit me, of the opening paragraph. Even the most innocuous detail becomes retrospectively weighted with odd and ominous significance in the wake of an atrocity, and is mythified as such for the collective. “Noticed” becomes “reported witnessing” after the gun goes off.

4. I have never seen this spelling of “in medias res” before, but I am, I’m sure, incompetent in many languages besides English.

5. Grateful as I am to be declared primus inter pares, I can’t help but notice how an anathema initially pronounced against Substack and self-publishing here swells to embrace “small presses,” too, apparently all of them, for which I am made a (safe) proxy. To explicate the logic of scapegoat sacrifice and elite retrenchment at work here—our critic uses the phrase “pick on” herself—you might consult many other articles published where else but in Compact magazine, our organ of record for both Girardian cultural analysis and intellectual populist critique. But such hecatombs are routine in the literary world; tired of pretending to be titillated by her no longer fashionable anti-liberal animadversions, they tossed Andrea Long Chu on a much larger pyre this week as well. (There is no “they” exactly, but you know what I mean.)

6. I was without power from Tuesday night to Friday morning. Some are still in the dark as I type. We could use a gritty naturalist exposé novel about the electrical monopoly this region languishes under. A strange synchronicity: the last time I remember a power outage in Pittsburgh this long, also caused by a storm, it was the summer of 1999. The electricity was out for three days even in the suburbs, and, without any other entertainment, I read the recently published Underworld, that novel of relentless modernity, by candlelight. This time I read Glass Century, a novel clearly in dialogue from its cover design forward with Underworld, also by candlelight. Life is a poem; everything comes back around.

7. Noah Kumin compellingly evokes this becalming power of art, its pacifying allowance of ambivalence, in his new essay, “A Russian Novel Saved My Mind.”

8. To avert charges of back-slapping and log-rolling, we ought to be pointing out flaws in one another’s work, so I will say I found the conclusion of the early Trump scene a little much—

Saul shook Fred’s hand and then his son’s. For a moment, Donald held his hand and stared straight into him, as if he were hunting for the answer to an especially penetrating or violent question. Saul did not blink. The kid let go, his teeth flashing.

“I’ll be seeing you,” Fred said, the office door closing.

Once the two were safely gone, Saul sprinted to the bathroom. He poured water and soap on his hands and scrubbed and scrubbed, relishing the heat against his skin, how it flared red as the germs slowly dissolved away.

—though I’ll also acknowledge we’re rewarded with a reappearance of the handwashing motif in the end, in the final pandemic sequence. (It really does help to read the whole book one is reviewing.)

9. I’m sure the vast influence exerted by Watchmen on a certain type of Gen X and Millennial novelist is an exhausting quirk for everyone else, but by the time the manga and anime generations come fully of age (cf. our honored Zoomer with “her Serial Experiments Laincore bedroom”), you may be begging to have Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan back.

10. Barkan referred to the novel as “Jewish Don DeLillo,” which inspired my rejoinder that Major Arcana is “Catholic Cynthia Ozick.” But I was interested to see that Glass Century co-stars a character named Alphonse Falcone to balance Major Arcana’s Marco Cohen. Al declares at one point, “Jews and Italians have always gotten along just fine,” and Mona herself reflects,

So much overlap between Italians and Jews, two huddled masses in the berths of hellish ships bound for Ellis Island, destined for the ghettos of the New World.

Anyway, I bring it up only to recommend Adam Kosan’s “The Last Colossus,” a fine career-summing retrospective on Ozick occasioned by the nonagenarian genius’s latest book, a flawed selection of her life’s work in fiction and essays:

As she wrote in a 1974 essay following the Yom Kippur War, “Abstractions cannot be murdered. If only it were possible to elude every violation, past, present, and future, by becoming a universalist abstraction!”

And it’s this sense of the lonely particularity of life — and its memory — perpetually endangered, vaporizing (an Ozickian word), slipping away from our hopes and intentions and protections, that establishes an imperative across her work, whether the writing is comic, outlandish, tragic, elegiac, or some combination of these. The fixation with history isn’t as we find in W. G. Sebald’s novels, in which anecdote and dream-like accounts of memories and historical record emerge out of one another for hundreds of pages. In Sebald’s prose, the development of historical echo and convergence generates much of the books’ drama and power. They are at the front of a reader’s attention, functioning at times like the telling word or phrase in a theatrical soliloquy.

Ozick’s poetics of history — and its underlying double, forgetting — are more concealed, and operate in a less apparent way. They might seem at first glance to offer mere variety of setting — place and time — but these are not interchangeable or fancifully chosen or merely superficial details. In effect they have a kind of generative power not altogether unlike, say, inherited poetic form or narrative constraints, providing Ozick with occasion and an incipient tone, just as a chance sound might reveal to a musician the way into a new composition. It’s not the range and variety of detail within each piece that is formidable so much as the range and variety across pieces. The project undertaken through the temporally (and culturally) ranging inventions of her fiction and preoccupations of her essays is to give, in the old Shakespearean phrase she’s fond of quoting, her subjects “a habitation and a name” — to draw them in relief against an ever-proximate, ever-encroaching, totalizing background blur. That blur is time, calamity, death, oblivion.