Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal and my guest today is Ross Barkan.

My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestoes:

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

I don’t know of a better description of craft. We know it when we feel it, when our writing reaches that higher level or when a book unlocks a part of us that we didn’t know was lying dormant. The thing not named is the mark we all aim at even if we can’t define it. And that is just what this series is: an attempt to catch that fugitive gleam.

Ross Barkan's latest novel, Glass Century, will be published in May. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for New York Magazine. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications and he maintains the popular Substack newsletter Political Currents.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Joshua Doležal: Ross, thanks for joining me today to talk about craft. Before we dive in, can you tell me a little bit about your novels? You're a journalist and a novelist – that's what I know about you. Maybe you can fill in some of those gaps.

Ross Barkan: Yeah, so I'm a novelist, I'm a journalist, I write essays as well, and opinion writing. I've done a wide variety of writing in my career, which is not as common as it used to be. There used to be many writers who wrote novels and also did essays and did reporting and so that has fallen off for a variety of reasons.

I proudly work in different modes and in terms of my nonfiction, a lot of it tends to politics and now culture. I've reported on politics nationally in New York for a long time and I have some insights there and I do a lot of essays on a variety of topics and I find myself writing more and more in culture and literature.

I'll be publishing my third novel this May called Glass Century, and each of my novels actually are quite different though two of them interact a little bit. The very first book I published, which very few people have read, in 2018, is sort of a genre bending literary fiction and soft sci fi book that teeters between the 1970s and this dystopian near future where corporations have enslaved people. And it's a lot of humor and pathos as well. And it owes, I would say, quite a bit to Thomas Pynchon's V, a book I was reading at the time.

Joshua Doležal: Sorry to interrupt, but you're making me think of Atwood's Oryx and Crake, where there are these corporate compounds and ChickieKnobs [a bizarre genetically engineered meat] and these kinds of obscenities.

Ross Barkan: It's, yeah, it's a little like that except very urban. You know, it's in New York City and people are serfs to various corporations since most jobs in this near future have been automated out of existence. And you know, it's not a novel that's intended to be predictive so much as I was very much looking to skewer our tech obsessions and sort of the corporate control of the economy. And also just have fun and write kind of this time travel literary work that sort of brings in some of the Pynchonian flair but also has some genre elements as well. And so that was my first book.

And I did a second novel about a fictional murderous cult in upstate New York. Since I was interested in cults and how one joins a cult and how they function and the mass psychology of the cult. And I wrote it from a child's perspective. I was a little influenced by Donna Hughes. And I sort of took it from there, you know, I liked the idea of working from a person who's aging into adolescence, watching this compound turn into a murderous cult that happens very gradually.

I should say the titles of these books. I'm being very bad about introducing myself. So the first one is called Demolition Night. That's the novel about time traveling and the corporate satire. And then the second novel also has night in the title, which was not my decision for the record, it's called The Night Burns Bright. I wanted to call it Every Side of Darkness, and the publisher actually vetoed it. Writers don't always pick their own titles.

So the first one and this one are both with Tough Poets, a small press in Massachusetts. And the second one was actually with Lake Union Press, which is a subsidiary of Amazon. Amazon actually has publishing, traditional publishing imprints, and they bought The Night Burns Bright. And so they were very good to me. And I don't have complaints other than I did not really like the title.

But the novel came out fine. It was well edited. I was very happy with the product itself and even how it looks. It's a nice cover. And then this one, Glass Century, is also Tough Poets. It's a panoramic social novel spanning from the 1970s to 2020 in New York City. It follows a family and sort of an illicit love affair. It encompasses the fiscal crisis in New York City and 9/11 and a lot of these other elements. It's my attempt at a great American novel, a great New York novel. I'm proudly ambitious about it and I hope a lot of people read it and I hope they enjoy it.

Joshua Doležal: You'd mentioned three influences. I'm not familiar with the last author that you mentioned, but your other influences were Pynchon, DeLillo, and Franzen. So that might be a good basis for digging into craft, kind of the principles or the sensibility that guides your writing.

So when you are working through a draft, and you know it's going well, kind of instinctively. Or you're going back through in revision, and you're trying to, you know, enhance the writing, you're trying to aim at a certain standard aesthetically, or at the sentence level. What are some of those pillars or principles that you follow? Are they intuitive, or can you articulate them?

Ross Barkan: I mean, there's a degree that it's intuitive, but I would say when I'm writing a novel, I'm not one, I don't outline thoroughly at all, I like to have a vague idea where I'm headed. I use the analogy of a lighthouse in the fog, and you're sailing toward land, and you know where land is, and you see that light vaguely in the distance, but you can't see too much more.

If I have that, I feel very confident. If I kind of know where I'm going, but I also don't stress it too much. So for me, when I'm writing, I need characters. I need people to live in. All my works are very character driven.

And if I have a character and I have a voice, that is very important. I have to start there. Who is, whether it's third person or first person, you're living with people. So who are these people? How do they sound? What do they think? Look, they could take on characteristics of yourself.

That's only natural. But you also have to move beyond yourself. And then I try to think through scenes, you know, what are my characters going to do? And then the writing and the characters can take on lives of their own too, and you don't have to so meticulously script it, at least I don't.

I care a great deal about the craft on the sentence level. But I'm also someone where I'm not going to sit in front of a blank page for, you know, minutes or even hours, not hours of time, not even minutes. If I commit to writing fiction, and I have time, I'm going to write something.

And I think you can always revise later on but you shouldn't be too precious about putting words on the page

Joshua Doležal: Let me, let me say back some of it. So character, voice, scene, those are kind of three principles that you follow. And I hear what you're saying about getting words down and first thoughts aren't best thoughts and you can't be paralyzed. But what I'm trying to drill down into a little bit more is, when you're in that kind of flow and you're writing a draft, and you know you're not just forcing yourself through it, you write something and you're like, damn, that's good. Or when you're going through revision and you recognize that there's this whole paragraph has got to go, what guides those choices? You'd Pynchonian antics or flourishes.

So I'm assuming that humor and freshness are part of that. I mean, I'm thinking of names from

The Crying of Lot 49, you know, the band that's called The Paranoids, and this character named Bloody Chiclitz. You know, those fun, quirky character names. So I assume that's part of what you're trying to bring in, is that, that edginess or playfulness?

Ross Barkan: I mean, I think writing is fun. And I think you can have it doesn't need to be 350 pages of modeling you know, deeply serious. I mean, you're serious in the end and you're sincere, but I think it's okay to write humor into dialogue. I mean, dialogue, yes, you're approximating speech, but it's also fiction. And I think there's a fictional quality to dialogue you have to keep in mind, which is it's got to be interesting. It's not just people saying what's up? What are you doing? Hey, man. I think when you read over your work, you start to develop an internal sense of what is good and what is not. And I find for me, I always like to print things out.

I've always had a printer, and so if I'm doing fiction, I've just written a lot of fiction, I print it out and go through it with a pen, and I find, does this work? And sometimes I'll read sentences out loud, how do they flow, because in your head versus spoken is very different, and I find that's helpful too. You need that ear, you, you need, you need that sense – that sense of rhythm, that sense of a metaphor that truly works in the brain or the simile. I find there's a danger to straining towards lyricism. I think lyricism has to come. I don't want to say it has to come naturally. I mean, you have to work at it, but, you know, it has to be something you're very meticulous about.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah, it's a vibe. I think lyricism is a vibe. It's something you feel rather than something that you state explicitly on the page. I want to drill down a little bit more into dialogue. There are several schools of thought on dialogue, but two of them that I think can be contrasted are sort of the Raymond Carver modernist school, which I guess could be attributed earlier to Hemingway, where there is, as you're saying, the dialogue is interesting, but it's also almost always comprehensible.

So it's a distillation. But it's almost at times a too perfect distillation. It doesn't really mimic how people actually speak. So it's often relying on understatement or implication. Tobias Wolff, of course, carries that further as someone who is influenced by Carver.

And then the other school, I think, is embodied by Douglas Unger, and then George Saunders, who studied with him in Syracuse. And that school is more thinking that dialogue should show all the slippages of meaning. There should be people talking past each other, or there should be redundancies or repetitions or things that end up actually not making sense. I don't know if you would agree with those two schools?

Ross Barkan: I think there's a synthesis between the two. I think there's a way you can reach an understanding because yes, people can talk past each other. Yes, there's an imperfection to human speech and dialogue, which can be captured on the page. At the same time, you don't need sort of the pretentious minimalism of a Carver or Hemingway, you know, whom I am fine with.

It's not my style necessarily. I see dialogue as different than both of those. I come from sort of the Roth school of dialogue, you know, , I'm a talkative New York Jew and, and I like when people have a lot to say and when they argue and get tangled up with each other and come out on a page and really announce themselves in a bold way. Not every character is that way. You can't have only people at a certain pitch. But I think there's a time certainly for poignant scene understatement and dialogue. A novel has an ebb and a flow depending on the scene, but also I think the writer can't lose track of the fact that this dialogue is supposed to entrance the reader in some form.

You know, DeLillo’s dialogue I enjoy a lot. DeLillo’s dialogue is not like real life at all. No one talks in real life that I've met like they do in a DeLillo novel, but I love that dialogue. I think that's part of the charm and part of the draw, why he's such a unique American writer. I think I'm maybe more in the Saunders school, but I'm also not too dogmatic about this.

Joshua Doležal: AS someone who spent a lot of my time as a child reading…so I grew up in Montana on 25 acres outside a small town of only a thousand people. So we're talking really remote and removed. And I was not consciously observing speech so much through my childhood. I was absorbing the rhythms of language in C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, you know, the books I was devouring in solitude. And so I think as a result of that isolation, I've always struggled with capturing speech because I'm much better at landscape or I'm much better at the scene, but the cadence of speech and making it seem plausible. To me, being a writer is, you shouldn't become a writer if you're good at talking because then you get the words right. The writer is the person who gets the words wrong extemporaneously and then has to go into their hermitage to get them right. So dialogue has always been a kind of moving target for me.

Ross Barkan: I agree with that. Tou're thinking it through, you know, you're premeditating all of it. So, you know, the great talker, the great charismatic linguist might not be a good writer, and the great writer may not give the best interview. And I think it was Nabakov who said writers shouldn't give interviews, and he would want to write out responses to questions and I think it's very understandable. It's hard.

Joshua Doležal: That's what I'm hoping to explore more in this series is how we make those choices. What are the tools that we're using? I'm assuming that with each of your novels where you're probably more consciously applying craft tools than perhaps in your journalism and opinion pieces, each project is a new challenge.

I assume that you're trying to raise the bar for yourself. So what are some ways that you're trying to expand your mastery of craft now or risks that you're taking where … it's like me trying to sing a Chris Stapleton song, like the vocals are maybe a little out of my reach, but I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try anyway. What are some ways that you're stretching yourself like that?

Ross Barkan: It's a really good question because I do think about this. In my perfect world, each novel is better than the next. You know, some of it, some of the stretches in subject matter. Right now I'm sort of working through another novel. I don't quite know where it's going, but it's very contemporary. Glass Century ends in 2020. That's when I finished it. But it is, you know, at its heart it's a novel where a lot of the action takes place in the past, and I think there's a certain challenge to writing a novel, kind of like Bonfire of the Vanities type, trying to capture the here and now in a book and that's something I want to do, and that's something I'm slowly trying to do right now.

What I find to be ambitious is trying to seek out new subject matter and different characters and have a different perspective. I think that's a very exciting thing about writers. I think in this era, there's been a lot of pressure to only write from your perspective. You know, if you're a man, you should write from a male perspective.

If you're a woman, you should write from a woman’s perspective, or maybe you can write from a male perspective. I think the beauty of writing is to be able to inhabit different types of consciousness. So that's what I always like about these social novels and someone like Wolfe trying to capture how we live. And I think a novel can do that a lot better than an essay can or a piece of journalism can, because you have the power of consciousness. And that's what novels do. They live in, they live inside of you and you live inside of someone else. And I'm always thinking about that and how I can get at it… We live in a very strange time, and I don't think many novels get at that, or they shy away from it.

Joshua Doležal: To me, craft is the only reason to write. It's the only “why” that is significant enough. I can't imagine writing purely for money or purely for growth on a platform like Substack. Those are hollow drivers and motivations for me. And yet, it seems to me that craft, in its most ambitious, maybe even formal forms, doesn't really have…it's kind of dead, you know, as a way of being discovered as a writer. Your reach, your platform, all of these things, your publicity potential seems to be driving things more often. So, I don't know, maybe you can argue back against that. Do you think I'm right that craft is dead as a market force, or do you think there will be more potential down the road for the pendulum to swing back the other way and for devotion to the long art, to literature, to pay off?

Ross Barkan: Yeah, I think in the short term, if you talk about conglomerate publishing, the Big 5, definitely craft as a market force is lost. I think that's very true at mainstream publishers and even kind of the larger indies. I think, unfortunately, editors today are overworked. Some of them have been fired. The whole economic structure of it is really in a strange place. And I see a lot of ossification and stasis in publishing now. It's very unfortunate. I think if you look at the success of Substack, for example, I read so many idiosyncratic and strange and wonderful writers who, if they wrote for a normal publication, they'd be told you can't have an adjective this way. You can't structure a sentence this way. I'm launching a book review publication in January as we talk now. And part of the fun is we're bringing in writers who write very differently and I think you can succeed on the level of craft and sentences on Substack.

Where it doesn't work is if you come with this sort of beautiful, bizarre writing and if you are the modern day, you know, Faulkner, Carson McCullers or Wolfe or you know, whoever, right, you come to a publisher, they'll say, what's your platform and what's the story? Can we sell it? And can it be a movie?

And publishers were always commercial, but I think it's gotten a lot worse. I think with consolidation, I think with fewer and fewer imprints that compete with each other. I think editors have lost interest. The editors still are given some level of support, I think a lot of them have lost interest in nurturing new careers. Gordon Lish is a bad example of this with Carver, but Lish could really pluck writers from obscurity and make a market for them. Sonny Mehta did this, Morgan Entrekin, you know, there are a lot of examples of editors not that long ago who really would find young interesting voices or middle aged voices or anyone who just was maybe even idiosyncratic in some way and they had faith in themselves that they could over time build careers and build a market.

So I think a lot of that is fading out, which is bad. I think the good news is if you are committed to your craft and you are writing, there are places for you. I do think in the coming years, there'll be more good imprints starting up. That's my sense. I think with this amount of stasis with conglomerate publishing, there's a market opening up for really good writing And I think Substack success is evidence of that and sort of the stasis of conventional magazines and media. You've got people like yourself and me and others who write Substacks and attract audiences.

So that energy is very real. That ambition is very real. So I'm an optimist in that sense.

I think there are a lot of people with great books out there that can't get them sold and they can't get them sold because honestly, like Hollywood, like the record labels, publishing has gone very stale. I would say on the literary side, they're making money. They don't have a financial problem. But in terms of the culture, they've got a problem. They are not finding and putting out great novels. But I think that's why Substack is successful. That's why YouTube is successful. Because the creative people are not taking it into their own hands. I've done it. You've done it. You can't sit and wait for an old school cultural power to reach down and anoint you as they used to do and do it successfully. They just can't do it anymore. I think culture will recover from this, but you know, it'll take some time. It's why it is really grassroots and that's a challenge, but it's also exciting too.

Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in April with a review of Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling. Stay tuned next week for a new craft essay.

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