Jack the Modernist

Synopsis

In Jack the Modernist, Robert Glück follows the unraveling of a love affair between Bob and the elusive Jack, a film director whose presence exerts an unusual hold over him. Set in the early 1980s, the novel moves through the intimate, restless world of gay life in San Francisco, where desire, sex, art, friendship, and self-invention are inseparable from the experience of everyday life.

Bob is fascinated by Jack and increasingly consumed by the relationship. His attempts to understand Jack lead him through bars, bathhouses, telephone conversations, fantasies, memories, and encounters with other men. Rather than presenting the affair as a conventional romance, Glück fragments the narrative into observations, digressions, recollections, and sudden revelations, capturing the unstable nature of desire itself.

Originally published in 1985 and long out of print, Jack the Modernist is an important work of the New Narrative movement, a literary tradition that blurred the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, criticism, and everyday experience. Glück's prose is playful, sensual, self-conscious, and deeply interested in the possibilities of language. The novel's unconventional form becomes a way of examining obsession and the difficulty of turning lived experience into a coherent story.

A cult classic of 1980s gay literature, Jack the Modernist is both a portrait of a particular literary and queer milieu and an inventive meditation on love, art, sex, and the limits of narrative.

About the Author

Robert Glück is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor, and artist. He was a co-founder, with Bruce Boone, of the New Narrative movement in San Francisco during the late 1970s. His fiction frequently combines autobiography, literary experimentation, criticism, and reflections on art and sexuality.

Glück is the author of Margery Kempe, About Ed, Elements, Denny Smith, and Communal Nude. He has also worked as an editor and teacher and served as director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Jack the Modernist was his first novel and has become one of the defining works associated with New Narrative.

Rob Halpern provides the introduction to this NYRB Classics edition. He is a poet, writer, and professor of creative writing whose work has engaged extensively with New Narrative and experimental literary traditions.

Publisher

New York Review Books Classics

Publication Date

October 28, 2025

Format

Paperback

Pages

176

Subjects

Literary Fiction; LGBTQ+ Fiction; Gay Literature; New Narrative; Postmodern Fiction; American Literature; San Francisco; Art and Literature; Sexuality; Desire; Love; Experimental Fiction

ISBN

9781681379715