Writing the Great American Novel

My effort arrives

There was a great pitcher named Bob Feller who reached the Major Leagues while still in high school and struck out the world. He was a sensation until Pearl Harbor and then he was, like most very young men, fighting in World War II. Feller lost prime years to the war but still ended up in the Hall of Fame. He was known, in retirement, for his cantankerous boastfulness; if read the wrong way, it came off as bitterness, but Feller wasn’t downbeat. He was a tireless signer of autographs and an eager interview subject. He carried around papers that showed, in some statistician’s view, what his career would have looked like if he hadn’t gone off to war. He had a simple mantra he lived by: if you are not willing to promote yourself, well, who will?

Writers often come off as sheepish. You aren’t supposed to state, outright, you think your writing is good. You are even less likely to say it’s great. Let others praise you or default, when needed, to the humble brag, some faux-bashfulness, the self-promotion that is not supposed to seem like an ego exercise, even though it is. Why are you tweeting out what you’ve wrote? Emailing it? Well, you believe in it.

Here arrives the novel I believe in, fully: Glass Century.

It will be published next spring, May 2025. That’s a while from now, but that’s how publishing works. Over the next year, you’ll hear a lot more about it. If I won’t fight for my book, who will?

I think it’s a great American novel. This is not an insult to anyone else: there are many kinds of great American novels, and mine is one more entry. It is my attempt—great or flawed, you may decide—to grapple with almost fifty years of history, from 1973 to 2020, through the lens of a family, two lovers in particular, Mona Glass and Saul Plotz. Young Donald Trump has a cameo, as does old Richard Nixon. There’s a vigilante stalking the streets of New York, and a peculiar tabloid desperate to take his picture. There’s 9/11, breaking the new century open, and Covid, ushering in another era of the hyperreal. There’s a dissident son, disappearing into the heart of the country. I linger on sport, tennis in particular, and certain kinds of motor-mouthed New Yorkers. I wrote for style, characterization, and scope; I believe Glass Century is a deeply human novel, as well as one that grasps, as best it can, at events. Many contemporary novels are too insular, too claustrophobic. Don DeLillo was on my mind as I wrote, as was Nell Zink, Philip Roth, and Alan Moore. It’s not, in my view, a difficult book. It’s also very personal. Those who have read it have found the pages rip right by. Last summer, a reworked excerpt of the novel became “Tad,” a short story published in KGB Lit.

In sum, I hope it’s a book people will read and talk about. I hope it will matter. It’s me, in some form, putting my money where my mouth is: I have complaints about contemporary fiction, so why not write the book I think should exist in the world? It will be my job to make Glass Century matter. That is the reality of the hustle economy. Would I prefer to do less work for it, not more? Sure. But I’m tasked with talking you into Glass Century. Blurbers and reviewers might too, but it will start with me. I lived with the novel for a long time and now I hope you will too.

I plan to say more in the coming months. I will share the cover with you, blurbs, and any news that might pop up. The last time I published a novel, in February 2022, Covid was still making it hard to tour. My hope, next year, is that I will get to come to your bookstores in the flesh, read, and meet you. I’ve never genuinely toured; that was the curse of publishing one book in 2021 and another in 2022. I’m ready to get out there.

There is the oddity of talking up a novel you’ve long completed. I’m passionate enough about Glass Century that I don’t mind it. It’s funny to think I first finished the draft in August 2020 after starting in November 2019. From there, it was a bit of an odyssey. One agent liked it but didn’t want to take it on the market then. (The Covid era was a strange time to shop novels.) Another eventually got it out there. Years rolled by. I stayed busy while being quietly frustrated. The blessing of such time passing was that I was able to grow my platform here. There are nearly 10,000 of you on the email list now. That wasn’t true a few years ago. I’ve made new friends and connections, and learned new insights. To make Glass Century a success, I’m arriving from a place of strength.

Galleys will, at some point soon, be ready. If you’d like to read and review, please let me know. Down the road, there will be a pre-order link, and I urge all of you to pre-order. For an author, pre-orders are everything, as close to life and death as it gets. A good run gets booksellers and media excited. A lousy run confines you, rather quickly, to oblivion. I’ll be back, certainly, to remind you of that.

I’m known as a political journalist and essayist, but literary fiction is at the core of who I am. My aim is to be a great novelist and my aim is to publish books. In my twenties, I would have been embarrassed to state this so directly. Now in my thirties, I don’t really see the point of such a pose any longer. Ambition is nothing to be ashamed of—honesty, even less so. Coyness is tiresome. In politics and journalism, I see it every day, and you won’t get it from me. I try to be frank. Glass Century will be worth your time. And I hope, come next year, it will be a big one.