At a time when readers and writers alike lament the diminished ambition and cultural place of American fiction, here come two new novels that, in their different ways, challenge and confirm that concern. Ross Barkan’s Colossus and Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline both lay claim to an old-fashioned grandeur. Both appear from niche presses: Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse, and Panamerica, a spin-off of David Samuels’s and Walter Kirn’s defiantly offline newspaper County Highway. And so the reader approaches them eagerly and with a certain wonderment, as if they’re elusive, half-legendary beasts.
Colossus is Ross Barkan’s follow-up to last year’s impressive Glass Century, an intergenerational saga set in New York City. His protagonist this time is 40-year-old Teddy Starr, a pastor at a medium-sized Midwestern church and the proprietor of a budding real estate empire. Teddy is a man of contradictions, which well exceed the Calvinist pursuit of spiritual as well as material ends. He holds that industrious improvement of the earth honors God’s creation but also doubts the legitimacy of mankind’s “dominance of nature, of the untrammeled world that is supposed to be shared in communistic fashion.” He harbors orthodox as well as pantheistic beliefs (“God is everywhere and inside me and you”). A married father of three, he is unfaithful to his wife. And this is not the last of his secrets.
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