Jack the Modernist

by Robert Glück

Set in the early 1980's, Robert Glück's first novel, Jack the Modernist, has become a classic of postmodern gay fiction. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. A paean to love and obsession, Glück's novel explores the everyday in a language that is both intimate and lush.

"Robert Glück has found a new way of making fiction passionate. This novel is a strange, exhilarating love story rich with invention and observation." -Edmund White

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Gay, Queer Lit, 20th Century, Literature

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Born in Cleveland, poet, fiction writer, editor, and New Narrative theorist Robert Glück grew up there and in Los Angeles. He was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Edinburgh, the College of Art in Edinburgh, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a BA. He also studied writing in New York City workshops with poet Ted Berrigan and earned an MA at San Francisco State University.

With Bruce Boone and other writers, Glück co-founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Glück’s experimental work—typically prose—infuses L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory with queer, feminist, and class-based discourse while exploring issues of autobiography and self. In his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,” which appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Glück stated, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.”

Glück’s poetry includes the collection Reader (1989) and, with Bruce Boone, the collaboration La Fontaine (1981). His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the novels Jack the Modernist (1995) and Margery Kempe (1994). Glück’s work has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992), Best American Erotica 2005, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006). He has received a California Arts Council Fellowship and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.

Glück has served as director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the first half I thought I had discovered a new favorite: breathlessly poetic, deeply sexy, with buoyant flights of fancy anchored by the social and sexual rituals of the gay artistic demimonde of 1980s San Francisco. Truly some of the most beautiful passages and individuals lines I've encountered in quite a while. But in the second half, as the central romance unravels, so does the fabric of the narrative—whole chapters are given over to increasingly ornate reveries and obscure spirals of thought, and it would kind of float away... somewhere... for long stretches of time (it kind evoked the sensation of becoming out of sync during sex, and of patiently waiting for a partner to finish and find their way back to a sense of intimate connection). This is no doubt an intentional narrative decision and while I still thoroughly enjoyed the book overall, by the end it definitely felt like our whirlwind affair was drawing to its natural close at just the right moment: I was ready to move on.

"His library appealed to me as a source of great potential energy. The books stood two deep, shelved with a free hand—mighty classics and plenty of books I'd never heard of sped up my heart with their flirtatious glances."

[Noel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why the fuck hasn’t this book been reissued yet? Semiotext(e), fix this.



“Getting fucked and masturbated produces an orgasm that can be read two ways, like the painting of a Victorian woman with her sensual hair piled up who gazes into the mirror of her vanity table. Then the same lights and darks reveal a different set of contours: her head becomes one eye, the reflection of her face another eye and her mirror becomes the dome of a grinning skull/woman/skull/woman/skull—I wanted my orgasm to fall between those images. That’s not really a place. I know. The pious Victorian named his visual pun ‘Vanity.’ I rename it ‘Identity.’ I relinquished the firm barrier that separated us—no, that separated me from nothing. I might have liked to shoot far for boundlessness but when I get fucked in the ass that rarely happens, it just spills.”

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NYRB for the gifted, advanced copy! 🏳️‍🌈

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

About ten years ago I'd buy up anything that went into the bargain section of B&N or Borders from High Risk Books, just because they put out a couple of the Stewart Home books, and I was hoping to find another writer like him. Time after time after time I was burned by this buying pattern. I don't know why it didn't ever dawn on me that all I was getting each time was 'edgy' gay and lesbian fiction, all of which seemed to be on the verge of painful to read, but I kept buying them. I was quite stupid, but I liked to think of myself as smart.

[Hux · Rating 3 out of 5]

It occurred to me as I was reading this that novels by (and about) gay men have something in common with novels by Scottish people. Namely, that they both seem to be under the impression that they are unique in experiencing certain human sensations. Scottish writers seem to think that only Scottish people have an accent (and therefore must AT ALL TIMES write the entirety of their books using that particular vernacular), and gay men seem to think that they... and they alone... have ever experienced something called sex. As such, this book has all the requisite fornication and is swamped by an inordinate amount of cock and balls and spurting semen and bum sex and... Yipee!!

I was rather enjoying this for the first third, it was fun, intelligent, well-written, and explored those first person experiences and that myopic personal narration that I'm a fan of, a book that has a voice, is introspective, the protagonist's inner thoughts emblematic of a poetic soul. Bob (Gluck barely conceals that this is very autobiographical) is a gay man living in London (for some reason) and meets Jack, a gay, 34-year-old intellectual with a life that suits his status. What follows is ostensibly a very thin story of their relationship where the reader is, it seemed to me, being asked to consider the fact that Bob loved Jack but Jack did not love Bob. At the very least, Jack appears to be somewhat distant. Except, it's hard to believe this entirely because Bob (the one in love, remember) has a habit of popping down to the local swimming baths to have several men ejaculate into his anus. And they say love is dead. But I think we're supposed to conclude that this is just how gay men work. They don't do monogamy or love or commitment like the boring normal people, they have exciting, promiscuous sex and express their love in a more artistic and progressive manner. Sigh. I mean, I'm sorry but there's something a little... not very romantic about that. Don't get me wrong, the sex isn't very gratuitous or unpleasant, or remotely shocking, it's just very boring. As I said at the beginning, Gluck, like so many gay authors, seems to think sex is a discovery unique to the gay community. It's only a small gripe but there comes a point where I really don't need the details. Let's just assume he put his thingamajig up your wotsit-called and move on. I'm trying to eat a fruit corner!!

Anyway, I was enjoying the book but it definitely felt like it dropped off as it went along, as though Gluck was more interested in his internal feelings than the external experiences, his spiralling private view, expressing it in a slightly obscure fashion, making the narrative ethereal and a tad self-indulgent. It never really developed or became as inspiring as it might have. Funnily enough, just like their relationship, what starts as a fun book descends into something a little dull and ultimately unimportant. Maybe that was deliberate but if it was then Gluck's a frikkin genius. But I highly doubt it. Definitely a book I would recommend, with moments of wit, creative prose, and thoughtful reflection (especially for the first third), but perhaps not as good as it could have been. 

[Troy]

this book was a bit of a mixed bag for me. i absolutely lovvvvved so many chapters and passages, the prose really was breathtaking. glück has some of the best literary sex writing i’ve ever read. having become acquainted with his writing style after reading his memoir ‘about ed’ i knew going in that his style is very abstract and requires close reading and a willingness to get lost within the narrative and this was definitely the case for this classic novel, way ahead of its time. i loved how the story centred on the narrator’s obsession with his lover as well as depiction of the gay community, the plotlessness of it all. my only quip being that some chapters i honestly was truly lost and couldn’t get a grip on what glück was getting at with some passages/references. probably more of a me issue, but otherwise, this was a delightful and challenging little volume. recommend if you’re into reading rediscovered queer classics.

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bob sees Jack at a forum, they make eye contact during a presentation, and Bob notices Jack's arm "draped around the back of the empty chair next to him as though it were a boyfriend." The extended arm hugging an empty chair is laced with implicit meaning: empty—so Jack is single, draped around a chair—so Jack is the dominant one, eye-contact—so he is cruising? Already Bob is in love with Jack and doing what lovers do: noticing, examining, fantasizing, reading for and projecting signs of availability, compatibility, reciprocity. Bob sees himself in the empty chair, imagines himself beneath Jack's arm, wonders what will happen next. Attention is the first act of desire.

Only a few sentences into meeting one another, they are speaking with ironic familiarity:

I said, "My flat's a few blocks away."
Jack looked past me, smiling into the crowd. "Let's read the Divine Comedy together out loud."
"Jack, we hardly know each other—how about some TV and then sex." We settled on a walk.

It's amusing banter but evasive. Jack demurs at the house invite and its innuendo of sex, and instead changes the topic to Dante; Bob is sarcastic and nonplussed and becomes even more explicit, not just doubling down on the proposition of sex but pooh-poohing the Divine Comedy and suggesting TV instead. There's a humorous bonhomie in that exchange but, to an outsider, the conversation would already suggest that the two are not well-matched: Jack prefers high art, indirectness, and intimacy; Bob is all about vulgar tastes, brash explicitness, and sex.

Getting to know Jack becomes an epistemological struggle for Bob. When Bob visits Jack's apartment, he scrutinizes everything in his house for signs of meaning: the decor of Jack's apartment ("The kitchen was yellow—it's cheerfulness more an academic point. The color said "Life is Great" but was contradicted by shabby cupboards, weary linoleum, chipped dishes and cookbooks shelved too high for use."); Jack's handwriting ("it was amazingly sleek and deliberate as set-type: the y's descended and the r's ascended, flags and pennants. I could love that."); even Jack's name ("From the envelope I learned his name was John. Jack was a nickname. I relished it: Jack is so flat like a flat rock or a landing strip between the flights a sentence can make. I could love that.") Bob registers every detail of Jack's life, sifting it carefully with studious attention, trying to divine the real man. Later in the novel, when Jack shares a short story about a former lover, Bob is transformed into a rabbinical exegete: "I applied myself like a Talmudic scholar decoding Jack the Unspoken, establishing the principles and guides."

Jack is a mystery—his age, his job, his sexual past are all a combination of lies, half-truths and fictions. Bob, understandably, is jealous and insecure, and spends much of the novel probing every word, every facial expression, for signs that Jack is in love with someone else or concealing some secret affair (hypocritically, Bob often goes to the baths and participates in orgies—but Bob's issue is not about sexual fidelity but rather about Jack's indecipherable aloofness). Bob has become a philologist of his beloved, an interpreter and relentless cross-examiner. Every gesture that Jack makes is imbued with a deeper, even magical power: Jack "ran his fingers through his curls to dispense with me," Bob notes and then needles him about whether he wants to fellate a young poet they just met. Later, Bob describes how Jack "smoothed my apprehension into a pillow and punched a comfortable place for his head to fall asleep on" and then "closed the chapter with an allegory". Bob has trapped Jack in a narrative of his own imagination, one in which every motion has some psychic symbolism, "smoothing" his fears and "closing" chapters.

"We are so edited. What if I tell you something serious?" Jack says in the middle of a quarrel. "You have gonorrhea!" Bob exclaims in response. It's another moment in which the two talk past one another. Jack means to say that the two of them are so self-censored, so filtered, so "edited" that they can never seem to talk candidly. Bob is always trying to play the role of the unpredictable but beguiling enchantress, and his response confirms Jack's point: "You have gonorrhea!" just drags the conversation back into the unserious and road-blocks an open pass to communication. Elsewhere Bob seems desperate for earnest truth-telling but in the moment he is afraid to confront such honesty head-on. And yet that word "edited" points to the larger crux of the novel: Jack and Bob are so clearly literary constructs, following prewritten scripts, playing the roles of lover, love-struck lover, love-sick lover, love-crazed lover, brooding lover, mooching lover, unfaithful lover, jilted lover—and the most ancient elegiac figure of the exclusus amator—the shut-out lover.

Jack is, like all ex-lovers, a gestalt and not a person. Bob has turned the man into a literary project, an interpretative riddle, a muse, an object of ekphrasis, a narrative topos. Jack the Modernist is allusively based on Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, but he is not a fatalist so much as a man resigned to his literary destiny: the treacherous lover. He is conscious of his own status as literary object in the course of the relationship. Bob is, after all, a writer. At the very end, Jack asks Bob to give him a different name in his story, perhaps something more epic and regal like "Alexander". He dreams of a different ending, but Jack fails to understand that he can only ever be a plot device. "You're not a lover until you blab about it," the novel opens. It's a supremely modernist inversion of the love story: the story written not to commemorate love but rather a love plotted and acted out to make a story.

It's is a brilliantly witty novel, less esoteric than Glück's Margery Kempe but no less cerebral and no less smutty.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Het juiste boek, op het juiste moment, vol met zinnen om eindeloos naar terug te grijpen: ‘Why not write a story about how people we love extend us and their loss is the door of our life shut in our face?’

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

a capital G Great American novel that bears more resemblance to what was going on elsewhere in contemporary literature (France, for instance, comes to mind given the clear inheritance from Bataille and Sadean erotics, and I was more than once reminded of the Argentine / French writer Copi). The prose is impeccable, better than most. At his best, Glück's simply one of the best prose stylists america has to offer. Funny, surprising, tragic. Made me very excited for Wayne Koestenbaum's forthcoming novel (Koestenbaum being a writer I associate, maybe a bit erroneously, with Glück's preoccupations).
Publishing really does so much infrastructural canon creation, it is a wonderful thing that NYRB reprinted Jack the Modernist this year. I suggest reading it sooner rather than later to get ahead of the curve.

[Skyler Pia]

Really lovely book! Really frustrating to track down in physical form! If you’re reading this and want to check it out, please spare yourself and hit me up to borrow my copy

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only / Sensation / Explains / Explanation

[Hail Slayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Excuse me, Sir, is this a great Romance silhouetted by the backdrop of History?"

What an unapologetically gay and endlessly fascinating piece of postmodernism that couldn't have been republished at a better time and NYRB is the perfect publisher to do it.

Written in the pocket between the gay liberation of the 1970s and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, this book provides a candid and hypnotic portrayal of a time of discovery and awakening in the establishment of gay culture and identity. Robert Glück writes with an assured and candid sense of authenticity but these vignettes are shrouded in surreal physicality that reaches from the past with a sense of urgency like a dream with a warning. So much beauty and optimism presaging so much tragedy and catastrophe.

[Christopher Louderback · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wild and erotic swirl of prose and poetry and autofiction — just immensely captivating in its beautiful and filthy writing. There’s nothing shy about Robert Glück’s pen. It left me out of breath.

“Go where no meaning is to create meaning. Take pleasure with the abruptness of deities. Or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, their first dance not less stunning because it doesn't include a home in the suburbs.

A man passing grazes my right nipple; he hears my gasp and returns interested. He traces a voluptuous circle around the nipple; a line of feeling shoots into my chest like the smell of gasoline. He looks at my face hard, he means it, then at the nipple. First there's a membrane that wants a caress: the rest is history. Do I describe his face? —two dots and a line. He's giving me an erection— that interests him. I asked my dad about nipples and he said yes, that's why he always wears cotton T-shirts, even cotton irritates them. During puberty I could make myself come by caressing my nipples if toward the end I laid one finger on my cock. The man who is interested tongues my left one; it makes a hot entrance into his mouth and then he sucks the hard tip in and out gently and patiently between his teeth: it causes air to rush through me. I fondle his hair and ears, I love him so much I would do anything he asked me to, my arms are weak.“

[Caty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some marvelous, evocative, practically priceless language and lines buried in a lot of wanking (yes, both literal and figurative, and even the literal is somewhat tiresome even though usually I'm very much the avid voyeur about gay boy sex.)I'll put some quotes in soon, though--very behind on my quotes.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like that the french flaps of this edition feature a pattern of flying penises. Just in case, you know, you didn't realize this book was about a gay man. Anyway, superb, read a lot about Gluck by way of Bruce Boone and was delighted to get my hands on this. I wasn't disappointed at all.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Why not write a story about how people we love extend us and their loss is the door of our life slammed shut in our face?"

[Cherie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give this five stars though for me personally, parts are much more sexually explicit than I can enjoy; I don’t fault the book for that - I do understand that as a feature of New Narrative. I loved Gluck as a writer however - I found the book structurally inventive, delightful and clever, and it has lots of sparkling prose. I may not re-read it cover to cover, but will definitely flip to some (many) parts for inspiration again. Overall, this was the intro to the movement I was looking for.

[Zoe Laris · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first I was like why do I need to know the business of these random gay guys this is essentially just a conversation I would try to avoid overhearing at MUD during the breakfast special but i began to appreciate that it is actually pretty beautiful. and then I was having fever dreams in his syntax (I have the flu)

[baruch]

to all my friends who added this to their to read list… i liked margery kempe better

[ColeOrion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gay people are weird

[Justin Levine · Rating 5 out of 5]

woah

[rndgmoat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much like our protagonist and his relationship with Jack, I was deeply committed to falling deeply in love with this novel as soon as I encountered it. The book produces a lot of pure reading pleasure, and of course it has gained retrospective historical resonance as it captures a lost world of a gay community that only briefly began to assert its revolutionary ideas about sex and identity before being attacked by the AIDs epidemic and a homophobic medical establishment. However, the ratings here are subjective and I have to admit that this very postmodern, very intellectual and theoretical work of literary deconstruction isn't really my thing. It isn't that I don't appreciate Gluck's challenging literary accomplishment on a philosophical level. However, as a very basic man whose diet of literary junk food has hardened him against the exertions of the postmodernists with their layers of gamesmanship and experimentation, I found the reading experience a little tiring at times. Still, a wonderfully unique reading experience and I'm glad I stumbled on this one, even if I didn't always "get" it.

[Robbie Herbst · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me the best aesthetic understanding of post-modernism (maybe the only time it’s made sense to me?) yet.

What a boring way to start a review for a book that is always a few strokes away from pornography. Anyway, this is extremely compelling and sad (and funny and optimistic too). I think what charmed me the most was that it couches the gay love story in the universal love story-it manages to draw the universal and the particular into a steamy bathhouse affair. Now that I’m thinking about it, Spirit of Science Fiction also ended with a bathhouse scene. Much to consider…

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Our lives resist artistic production: there is either an Auschwitz of meaning or a Farrah Fawcett vapidness that goes to the bone'.

'Someone thrusts a tongue in an ear and the person squirms like a speared fish'.

'We page through each other's bodies like a porno magazine where after fifteen seconds you turn to maintain a buzz'.

'So, I thought, a parent's love for a child is not different from the love between lovers, not merely as intense but cut from the same cloth'.

'I can't help to think that that ass of his caused him a lot of trouble in prison'.

[Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

inventive,

Inventive and somewhat ingenious, but I felt nothing. Descent descriptive sex. I’m not impressed that the author can reference Sarte and Grace Paley. It adds nothing to the work. A sentence like he was the toothpick between my two halves of a club sandwich, my being and nothingness, is unintentionally hilarious.

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little bit of O'Hara, little bit of Sam Delany, little bit of James McCourt, all pretty good.

[Robbie Claravall · Rating 4 out of 5]

narration under temporal pressure

‘You’re not a lover till you blab about it.’ In JACK THE MODERNIST, affection acquires weight only once it enters circulation, once it travels from skin to mouth to telephone wire to the room of friends where everyone becomes, by participation, a minor witness. Bob speaks because speech promises duration; he wants a continuous tense in which desire can keep its appointments, yet the book keeps returning him to scenes where intimacy appears as a flare and then withdraws, leaving behind a faint singe of doubt on the mind, and the only remedy he knows is to talk again, to retell and to set the episode down among other episodes until accumulation itself resembles a form of truth. Set in 1981, the book thrums with a peculiar brightness that carries a premonitory pressure, a world of baths and beds and parties whose abundance already feels like a document addressed to people who will come after, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the Future’, and the question that keeps widening beneath the gossip and the lovers’ names is stark and metaphysical: how does a self persist when desire no longer carries the imagination of tomorrow?

Jack becomes the book’s most disquieting emblem of that abeyance, an augmenter who enriches Bob’s inner life while withholding the ordinary inventory of reciprocal knowledge that would let love settle into recognisable form; Bob compensates by compiling an internal dossier, a cabinet of inferred motives and curated tells, and the result resembles a clerical error in the cosmos, a person replaced by an index of conjectures. Sex enters the book as a field of contact whose immediacy keeps failing to consolidate into knowledge, encounters vivid and porous in the moment yet unable to retain contour once recalled, so that Bob moves from body to body seeking not only sensation but some durable residue of being chosen that might survive the night and be spoken of the next day without embarrassment or diminution, and this search, carried out with sincerity and mounting unease, exposes how easily intimacy can occur without consequence and how readily touch can evacuate meaning at the very instant it seems to offer it.

Talk, then, emerges as the book’s binding medium and its enduring liability, the channel through which affiliation coheres while feeling risks conversion into account, so that JACK THE MODERNIST oscillates among tonal registers—private candour, communal chatter, something resembling an incident report assembled after the fact—leaving the reader to infer continuity from partial sightings, a series of impressions whose authority rests precisely on their incompleteness. Glück refuses consolation by arrangement: the beds, the names, the calls, the future addressed in advance all occupy the same temporal plane exposed to time’s indifference, and from this exposure arises the book’s exacting claim, that intimacy may strike with undeniable force and still fail to extend itself forward, and that community may speak at length, circulate endlessly, and yet remain incapable of granting tomorrow. Lucidity does not spare desire from persisting all the same, so to blab, then, becomes the act by which love attempts to earn existence through utterance alone, staking its claim on the thin, audacious hope that speech might still make a future answerable.

[Juan Garza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Glück nunca pierde su diente filoso de prosa poética en su novela debut Jack the Modernist. Sí se le va la trama, y el tema a veces lo perdemos pero se pierde como si estuviéramos snorkeleando, observando el fondo del mar a través del agua nítida a unos metros de distancia, nunca dejamos de ver la arena pero su tinte cambia conforme la marea poco a poco nos absorbe, más lejos de la playa, más cerca del estómago misterioso del océano, donde peces raros coexisten y tienen tertulias con lámparas adheridas a sus cuerpos. Apenas los puedo ver porque yo no me sumerjo, me mantengo a nivel de olas. Me percato de la profundidad en la que ahora me encuentro y siento más frío, menos luz alcanza mis ojos reflejada, temo que estoy excluido de la introspección de este libro. Me temo que es mi culpa. No debí traer solamente snorkel, debí venir preparado con todo el atuendo buzo para poder adentrarme bien. De todos modos creo que alcancé a ver los animales más grandes que nadan estas aguas: como mantarrayas de "Your navel is like a round goblet, your nipples are two fawns, twins of a gazelle", bancos de atunes en formación de "In an afternoon she recreated both our childhoods and also the Austro-Hungarian Empire out of chocolate, walnuts, [...] and poppy seed", delfines que discuten el orden de eventos después de que un hombre se desintegra, ¿primero se vaporiza o primero se proyecta? ¿Cuándo muere quemado? (así lo interpreté yo al menos, estaban algo lejos). Me imagino todos estos peces y pienso que "es imposible imaginar ser un pez meneándose en el agua sin sentirse al menos ligeramente excitado"

Glück es un maestro de poner imágenes en mi cabeza pero justamente la inquietud sobre la cual pondera al inicio de la novela, sobre cómo solidificar la naturaleza dislocada del modernismo con la continuidad narrativa y la profundidad del sentir, es muy pertinente pues siento que no encuentra respuesta en este proyecto. Creo que hay mucho que decir sobre la pregunta de identidad al menos, su volátil posición en un mundo que ha perdido significado, en donde la historia de amor, contrapuesta a la historia de amor, se cancela a sí misma y deja tras de sí solo vacío y gestos humanos de infinita insignificancia. Buscar el significado en donde no lo hay como encontrar una historia de amor en un vínculo evitativo que nada ofrece (yo soy el vínculo evitativo, ptm). No sé si con eso pueda resumir Jack the Modernist pero de momento así lo puedo dejar.

[Scott JB · Rating 3 out of 5]

A re-read from many years ago, when I read this simply because it was gay and not because I had any understanding of the New Narrative movement or what Glück was using fiction to "do".

This time around I had a better appreciation for his artistic project: at the very end, in the author's note, Glück mentions Roland Barthes, and 'Jack the Modernist' becomes - suddenly very clearly - a novel form of some of that book's ideas, about who the lover "is" when in love, and the love-object as a creation of their mind. And along the way, the book is full of language games and set pieces that explore the modern mind, the self made of media it has consumed and is influenced by, the essayistic mind that tries to make sense of itself through theory and comparison.

But let's be clear- that's an intellectual project, exciting to that part of one's brain. But this is still a novel, and on that front it's one that begins well but, like the narrator's love affair with Jack, loses energy and tails off. I'd say the first 60 pages have the most energy: Bob and Jack meet, Bob begins to 'construct' Jack in his mind, there's sex and parties and some theorising, a few language games. But due to the nature of this project, the language games never escalate, the narrative momentum dips, and Jack remains a mystery, a cipher. Much of the novel's middle feels like the wheels are spinning. There's a lovely scene at the end (one I think Sigrid Nunez might have borrowed at the end of The Friend?) in which Bob and Jack discuss his novel and "using" Jack in fiction, including how they come up with giving him the pseudonym Jack. But this was a scant pleasurable reward after a few chapters where I felt a little bored, hungry for some actual plot and character rather than just language-play.

[Jak Merriman · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘It held a certain nostalgia for me like all the places where I picture myself asleep—like adolescence when I burned for abstract cock, the deity of arousal. Now I think I mean union beyond Jack so absolute it lacks a name. Pleasure carried him toward me. I turned and fled into my body—by that I mean I 'gave him' my ass. He followed, looking gloomy and severe. I fled, he followed: I squatted and his arm circled my waist, controlling my body, his cock deep in my ass, in my very center. To see us you would think piston and valve, except there's flesh on the inside and flesh all around so that's something different. The more you get fucked, the more you want it; eventually the pornographic hungry hole becomes merely accurate. I was surrounded by an O sound that was at once the voice of sex and the shape of the orifice he pounded. I saw myself as a bobbin winding and unwinding yet my orgasm was removed and extraordinary: I am visiting a country that always exists beyond me.’

It could be the greatest thing ever written. It demands to be read, to be gulped. So much cum and relentless forward-thinking that you’ll finish it drunk, your dick will feel tired and your balls achy. I want his mind and I want to fuck it then steal it, gaping O of a mind. Fuck!