WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO, debut art-critic novel

WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO
JED PERL
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A candid novel about the art, artists, and their tempestuous relationships in the countercultural movement of the 50’s and 60’s, by one of America's most celebrated art critics.

During intermission at a modern dance performance in San Francisco, esteemed and incorrigible cultural critic Marcia Lang collapses into a banquette and dies on the spot. Her lover, Burt, soon discovers that Marcia willed him her entire estate. His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco. As he processes Marcia’s death alongside their cadre of Berkeley bohemians, Burt begins to reconstruct Marcia’s work in progress as an elegiac collage for the friend he’s lost and the city that found her.

In his first novel, Jed Perl guides his reader down the back alleys of a mid-century San Francisco populated with painters, puppeteers, paperback revolutionaries, and the writers like Marcia who determined their positions in the cultural ecosystem. Through energetic and immersive prose, We Never Called It Frisco tests the structural limits of the novel as a site of reconstitution and remembrance.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The post-war history of US art, in novel form.

If nothing in you perked up at that précis, don't get this read onto your TBR because it's the sum total of the story. Marcia and Burt are names, not characters; their personalities aren't developed, though their...her...critical opinions about art are. Burt is quiet, he's more observant than Marcia's professional eye for art (and its movements) is.

The central tragedy, Marcia's early death, takes place before we-the-reader have the chance to invest in her whether positively or negatively. For that to work as a novelistic technique, the way we learn about her needs to be more personal, more through memories than through her writings. Burt's devastated, naturally; why would that not lead a storyteller into flashbacks, accompanied by her writings? Instead we listen to Marcia's judgmental pronunciamentos interspersed with Burt's sadness. It's not propulsive, nor was I expecting it to be; but it's also progressively less involving.

I liked the idea of this debut novel enough to finish it, and should Author Perl write more fiction, I will seek it out to read. It's not the best work he's done. But it's also not the best work he will do.