Common Sense and Sensibility

Thoughts on a new magazine

My new novel, Glass Century, comes out in May. You should pre-order it now and come to my launch event. (More details to come.) Christopher Sorrentino, who was nominated for a National Book Award for his outstanding novel Trance, has said: “The soundtrack to Ross Barkan’s new novel should be a wailing siren. Glass Century keeps pace with an anxious and changing New York as it tracks its protagonists from the Fear City days of the early seventies through September 11 and onward to the trauma of COVID-19. Generous and funny, this smart, expansive book kept me utterly engrossed.” Listen to Sorrentino!

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A couple of weeks ago, the new book review and culture magazine I co-founded, The Metropolitan Review, became real. We started publishing literary criticism and essays from a wide range of very talented writers. Among our contributors is a woman who wrote one of the great novels of the twenty-first century, and others who have made their names writing in prestige publications. At the same juncture, we have also been excited to publish relative unknowns: those who are talented and idiosyncratic but don’t boast traditional writing CVs. The reception, overall, has been quite gratifying. Several of the reviews have already kicked up spirited debates and we earned some (grudging) praise from the writer Brandon Taylor which, to be honest, means a lot. Taylor is an unsparing critic, and if he sees something in us, I am quite proud. If you haven’t already, you should pledge $50 so we can properly fund our upcoming print issue.

The Metropolitan Review is, simultaneously, of an old and new vintage. Two immediate models were the twentieth century versions of the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice. Each were known as belligerent “writer’s” publications that nurtured the careers of important essayists, novelists, journalists, and intellectuals. There will probably not be reportage like the Voice’s in TMR—we are contemplating fiction and poetry in addition to reviews and essays, but not commissioning anyone to show up at City Hall—but there will be a commitment to an ethos of honesty and exploration. We want a wide array of thinkers in our pages. We are fine if you disagree with us. And we want our writers to sound like themselves; we are not interested in any “house” style or overriding sensibility.

This last element has been confounding to some. Most magazines and journals seek a unitary aesthetic and party line. They have editors who lovingly enforce this, who ensure, well, a New Yorker piece sounds like a New Yorker piece. There is nothing wrong with this; it’s just not what The Metropolitan Review is after. Since we have quite a bit of stylistic diversity in our pages—the writers can be, in turn, elegant, raffish, reserved, and boisterous—there have been a few critics who complain we simply aren’t editing enough. “Are you not editing your writers? Why gather as a publication if there isn’t at least some attempt at a sensibility not of thought, but of care and attention[?]” asked the books columnist John Warner in the comments section of one of our recent reviews. Why gather, indeed? The Voice, today, is remembered as a leftist weekly newspaper, brawling and anti-establishment. And it was. But it was also home to a remarkable amount of aesthetic and ideological diversity. The Voice could publish vanguard hip-hop writers like Greg Tate while employing Stanley Crouch, a fierce defender of jazz who loathed hip-hop and rap. They could feature Marxists, radical feminists, anti-abortion libertarians, quasi-reactionary blue-collar journalists, and many others in a single issue. They weren’t alone, in that regard: a magazine like Esquire might have had the sensibility of New Journalism but it wasn’t as if Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese actually sounded alike. Neither writer, coming to the fore in the 1960s, would survive most editors in the 2020s. Nor would Joan Didion, who was plenty discursive if restrained compared to Wolfe. Gore Vidal and Elizabeth Hardwick were not dulled down for NYRB. Editors still edited plenty at midcentury, just as we at The Metropolitan Review read carefully and edit all we attempt to publish. What good editors did then was recognize unconventional talent and permit it to flourish.

We are deeply conscious of voice; we are not going to squelch it. I love that Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli, Tara Burton, Vanessa Ogle, Alex Perez, Jessa Crispin, and ARX-Han do not share an aesthetic. If I’ve rambled enough about what makes The Metropolitan Review “old,” I’ll underscore what places us at the vanguard, for now at least: having a Substack. The spirit of New Journalism and the Voice lives on Substack. There’s a reason these newsletters are booming as the rest of the mainstream shrinks. We live, as my co-founder Sam Kahn has said, in a writer’s renaissance, with no shortage of talent, now unchecked, thriving across this network. Substack is not without its flaws and there are certainly writers who are superior to others, but it is genuinely easy to curate a list of highly original and provocative newsletters to read each day. This is the technicolor world. At The Metropolitan Review, we aim to create a strong institution to nurture and harness talent. Not all of our writers have come from Substack, but many have. It is no accident that, since we launched at the end of January, we have become one of the more widely read literary publications around, at least when it comes to those who publish literary criticism. There is engagement with what we do—encomiums and scorn alike. I welcome both. The worst thing that can happen to any publication is to be ignored.

The sensibility of TMR, then, is voice. Another is a degree of genuine editorial freedom. The individual must emerge, unscathed. At some point, you have to trust the writer. For whatever reason, there’s a good deal of institutional writing that is now middling, forgettable, and risk averse. Enforced aesthetics rarely reward ambition. Length, for one, is often feared. Adjectives and adverbs are viewed warily. Any sort of digression is treated as a scarlet letter; the modern editor dreams of excision first, not addition. What’s funny is none of this used to be the case, whether it was in acclaimed novels or nonfiction. The nineteenth century novel, in America and Britain, abounds with digression, and the giants of the twentieth century, whether they were Roth or Oates or Delaney, reveled in pushing the English language to its limits. What would any contemporary young editor make of Dhalgren if it one day thudded on their desk? How much red pen—or Google track changes—would be applied to such a glorious and delirious novel?

It is easy to sneer at the writer who tries. There’s a posture that took root on 2010s Twitter and still infects a certain kind of cultural observer; they cannot handle it when a writer wants to be ambitious. It grates them. They are like the sly, slump-shouldered poseurs at the track, snorting at how much the 100-meter racer is perspiring as he trains for the big meet. The trouble is the slump-shoulders never have a particular theory of aesthetics or change. They are all no, never yes. They know, dimly, they want less and not more—containment, not excess—but beyond that they are bereft of ideas. There are reasons to dislike any new production, especially The Metropolitan Review, but these critiques need to be ultimately rooted in something beyond lazy affect and the feeling that there must be, in all of life’s engagements, two sides, and the worst fate is to end up wherever is deemed “dissident” or “wrong.” This attempt at thinking, woefully Manichean, is falling out of favor. The budding culture of the 2020s, quite different than the 2010s, won’t be hospitable to it, and we should all be thankful. To paraphrase a Nobel Prize winner who’s got a biopic out now, you have to admit that the waters around you have grown and you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone. None of us know, exactly, what’s coming next. But it’s good to embrace the high tides.