Political Currents is the highly subscribed New York politics newsletter where readers these days are most likely to encounter Ross Barkan, if not in the New York Times Magazine, the New Statesman, or the host of other periodicals to which he is a frequent contributor. Written from the Left, the newsletter appeals not to the partisan, but instead has a gritty feel for the flow of power in the city and state that have refined politics into a Machiavellian art.

What readers of Barkan’s political writing might not know, though he has been dropping hints for some time, is that Barkan is also a novelist. With Glass Century, his third and most high-profile novel to date, he makes a bid to be known as a novelist first and foremost. An ambitious and impressive work, it pulses with the same spirit as his reporting, yet reveals ever greater human and imaginative depth.

The story begins in the 1970s and ends in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It centers on Mona Glass, a local tennis star and Brooklyn-born child of middle-class Jews, and Saul Plotz, a trained lawyer and Marxist former political science lecturer now working as Queens borough director for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal Republican. The day the insouciant, liberated Mona walks........

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