Jack the Modernist

Review

“Sex was the reply to any question.” There’s a lot of sex in this book, and a lot of it is quite hot to read. But it is not exactly smut. There is something in it of the loss of sense, the obliteration of the person by way of pleasure into nothingness. All that aside, a lot of it is also simply hot to read.

I bought this without knowing anything about it in the NYRB sale. I saw the penis-graced cover (in what I will call an art style I do not like, apologies to the artist Louis Fratino), saw that it was apparently pretty gay, and figured why not. The back jacket has a quote from William S. Burroughs:

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.

This is a good blurb for the book. The sex is core and critical to the text, without it it would have almost no meaning. It is rendered clearly, palpably, and somehow up-close and far-away simultaneously. Glück writes a scene of his protagonist being held up and fucked by one man while another strokes his body and another sucks him and another… And in the midst of excitement, it turns into some critical self-reflection like this:

A wail of protest goes up: sensitive nipples, tender skin on the inner thigh—the knowledge of which equals intimacy—what happens to these secrets once I have shared them with so many Freds that I am a machine whose quirks and eccentricities are appraised in a cheerfully businesslike way? If I’m so dispersed, what happens to the possibility of intimacy for me?

or another segment where Glück’s protagonist describes something akin to wishing he could dissolve into sex, to cease being and become a piece of (as I think it is written), ‘fuck-meat.’

The want to self-erase is pervasive, or maybe it pervades me because I feel a wish to disintegrate into nothing a lot. In Glück’s writing, I doubt it is quite the same feeling. During the descriptions of the orgies and sex within, I often thought of Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Burroughs’ “Queer,” where Lee (Craig) and Allerton (Starkey). Their sex becomes a merging, almost mystical, their hands sliding under each others’ skin, their bodies forming one, the want for them to be each other. It’s a feeling and a sensation that Luca captures much, much, better than Burroughs in the source material, and it feels present here, too, if inverted. Glück sees these anonymous interactions as a kind of non-existence, a way to dissolve the self amongst a throng of bodies, sweat, cum and spit. It reminds me a lot of Greenwell’s line in Small Rain (also talking about cruising and communal, sexual spaces) ‘camaraderie of filth.’

For many of us, these wild orgies are probably confined to fantasy (and how thankful we are that someone like Glück writes them so well). I don’t have a moral judgement on that. That these things remain fantasy does not change the direct connection that good writing can shorthand, to feelings of acceptance, desire, pleasure, but also anxiety, shame, and guilt. Not to mention the double-helix nature of Love/Lust, so interconnected.

Good book! I put a cover on it and felt a little nervous reading it in an airport and on an airplane, but thankfully no one was sitting beside me when I turned the page (to page 82) to find a leather-vested man throttling his cock.

Notes

• p7 - When he left the apartment I gathered up his cigarette butts and smoked them even though I didn’t smoke.
  • TB: Once, after someone left my apartment, I found they’d gotten crumbs all over my couch. It made me smile and I had to stop myself licking them off the leather. I just swept them into a napkin and threw them away. Like Glück’s writing here, it wasn’t sexual. It was about wanting to be entwined, connected. To share.
• p33 - My mom would say, “Write a list, get a handle on your problems, deprive them of their active ingredient, time.” So I found a clean page in my yellow legal tablet and also the No. 2 pencil I swiped from Jack because his teeth had marked the wood. They were Jack’s teeth but anyone could have done as much; I stole that intimacy and generality as a talisman.
• p38 - She is a reserved, elegant woman and despite the collective impression she makes of a well-stocked pantry, she likes outré movies, science fiction and horror, perhaps because these movies conjure a time when good and evil were clearer.
• p48 - Bruce liked him and I did too although after twenty minutes about his book and travels and friends and plans, when Cyrus finally did ask me a question about my life, it stood out so baldly, so lacked conviction that he turned the question into a joke.
• p48 - I overheard Jack say, “Americans get all worked up when they see Roots and Holocaust but the fact that our tax dollars finance the same shit in El Salvador is page ten news.”
  • TB: Wow, this has aged unfortunately well.
• p52 - Men stood around, serious, watching us as I had gravely watched the chunky man. We watch the pleasure rather than the men, feeling the potential interchangeability. One of them masturbated me, others tended me respectfully because the one who is fucked induces awe by his extreme exposure.
• p59 - A wail of protest goes up: sensitive nipples, tender skin on the inner thigh—the knowledge of which equals intimacy—what happens to these secrets once I have shared them with so many Freds that I am a machine whose quirks and eccentricities are appraised in a cheerfully businesslike way? If I’m so dispersed, what happens to the possibility of intimacy for me?
• p71 - When he was right in front of me I reached up to his hip and lightly pivoted his cock into my mouth. We made love for hours; we seemed to have identical rhythms. Even anonymous sex has a huge range of commitment to a partner and to fucking.
• p84 - TB: letter to Bob from Brian.
• p86 (and referencing the letter on p84) - The first paragraph made me happy; the last discharged a shock that hit my nipples and groin. Dear Abby, is it wrong for me to meddle in his life? She replies: I used to have an answer to that question; now I don’t.
• p92 - . . . I realize that I don’t know how to use language intimately in a direct way . . .I know I had trouble being intimate even before I learned to associate intimacy with pain and self-humiliation. It’s hard for me to tell one person what I wouldn’t be able to tell twenty people or ten or five or ten thousand.
• p102-103 - TB: funny joke.
• p106 - There’s Bob face down in the dirt, cock and balls jutting back between his legs. His hands spread his cheeks. We owe a debt of gratitude to the gay movement that now tough dudes take it up the ass as part of their charisma and manly charm. You laugh at this position? Bob knows what he wants—are you the one to fulfill his desire?
• p119 - Maybe he was right. Maybe I wanted to acquire him like a happy ending, like a refrigerator. Could a labor-saving device be my other? Maybe Imistook knowing the same things for knowing him. Still, how else do we know people; still, is that all it comes to?
• p120 - I want a relationship with historical precedent,societal messages, old gestures with new meanings; a relationship that’s ordinary, inconsistent, “boring,” physical: if there are any sensitive men who want some action, give me a call.
• p123, in one of the many segments of this book where the text looks a bit more like a play:

    	BOB: Okay, let’s settle it—then we won’t be lovers. 
    		(That’s the firs time the word lover is spoken.)
    	JACK: Not necessarily.
    		(Bob is thunderstruck.)
    	BOB: Jack, do you think I’m going to give you a raincheck?
    	JACK: I want you in my life.
    	(It’s what Bob said to Brian.)
    

• p128 - Phyllis said, “I found caches of his cigarette butts around the house, I hunted for them, and even though I don’t smoke I smoked them all.” I had a shock of recognition. 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.
• p138 - O God, I pray in totally bad faith, don’t make me a masochist—already my knees are bending before whatever it is I love, the better to worship it. No one is a greater slave than he who imagines himself to be free when he is not free.
  • TB: italics in original.
• p141 - Then, after these thousand hours of nuance and complexity, Jack abruptly fucks me, comes in a minute with the sound of a stifled sneeze and leaves me and my orgasm orbiting, a distant planet, alone and excited. Loneliness is violence in slow motion. He says good-bye and rolls away.
  • TB: italics in original.
• p146 - I saw myself as the other woman in As the World Turns, the one who’s a friend of a friend for a few episodes, then on to Edge of Night playing the next door neighbor’s second cousin. I am an extra and if I don’t appear again, no offence.
• p150 - I eagerly returned to perceiving Jack as he chose to be perceived, as he revealed himself: The love story is the tribute the lover must pay the world in order to be reconciled with it.
  • TB: italics in original. But also, does writing it out bottle it up and toss it out to sea? I don’t find that these feelings can be contained, packaged, delivered and excised. They carve out your insides and then that is all that’s left of you.
• p155 - OH LOVE is a traveler, a traveler on a river, a river of no return. Of course there’s a lot to be said about a love story because the stakes are so clear: hold the story up, view it from one angle—happiness. From another—misfortune. Then banality sets in: I loved one who loved me not.