Jack the Modernist - by Robert Glück (Paperback)

About the Book

"This novel is set in San Francisco in 1981, a world of loss that doesn't add up. Bob loves Jack, Joe-Toe does too, and Phyllis loses her son. 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"--

Book Synopsis

A cult classic now back in print, this novel about sex, obsession, and art is one of the defining works of 1980s gay fiction.

A classic of postmodern fiction, Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist portrays the slow disintegration of a love affair set in the early 1980s. 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. Out of print for decades, Glück's paean to desire and obsession explores the everyday in an idiom both intimate and lush. Sensual as well as sensational, self-conscious, but never self-serious, Jack the Modernist is a candid and heartfelt lover's discourse unlike any other.

Review Quotes

"In Jack the Modernist self-exploration is so precise as to become impersonal. And some real sex at last. One is reminded of Genet and the transmutation of sex into something beyond sex. Glück even makes the disappointments, impasses and blind alleys of love moving and interesting. He seems to say everything in a fresh way. Not since Genet have we seen such pure love of the human body and soul...seen as one flesh palpable as a haze."
--William S. Burroughs

"In Jack the Modernist, Robert Glück explores nuances of love never annotated before." --Edmund White

"Jack the Modernist is the novel with the most information and most beauty. Glück is an extraordinary philosopher of ethics, aesthetics, and the English sentence--a thinker of the originality of William James, with the formal range of his brother Henry. This republication is cause for celebration not only because Jack the Modernist is an utter joy to read, but because it calls our attention to an era-defining artist and public intellectual in our midst."
--Lucy Ives

"In Jack the Modernist we find a testing and perfecting of language so skillful it appears to merge completely with the author's intelligence and feelings."
--Dennis Cooper

"What Glück shows us is that some of the most meaningful experiences of life only get deformed by being squeezed into the structure of a story. A collage like Jack the Modernist offers different satisfactions, different ways of apprehending experience." --Matthew Cheney

"The elaborate, imaginatively stunning discursiveness of Glück 's writing is itself the very joyful, harrowing resolution to [Jack the Modernist's] conflict; in effect, art compensates for life's failures to reciprocate. In so doing, it recasts Bob's obsessions with his own experience into a plethora of responses that engage the reader cathartically and craftily."--Steve Benson, San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and editor. With Bruce Boone, he founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco. His poetry collections include Reader and, with Boone, La Fontaine. His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith, and the novel Jack the Modernist. Glück edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and his collected essays, Communal Nude, appeared in 2016. Glück served as the director of San Francisco State's Poetry Center, co-director of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. He lives in San Francisco.

Rob Halpern is the author of Music for Porn and Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World. Together with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, he edited From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice, which includes his longer essay on Robert Glück's writing. Rob coordinates The Writers' Bloc, a poetry writing workshop inside Women's Huron Valley Women's Prison in Southeast Michigan, where he is Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University. His translations of Georges Perec's early essays on culture & politics will appear with Verso in Fall 2026. He is currently working on a book of essays entitled New Narrative and Other Gay Fictions.