We Never Called It Frisco
By Jed Perl
Coffee House Press
September 2026
Jed Perl wrote a novel about art world bohemians who believe they are gutsy and take risks.
Reading the book, We Never Called It Frisco, leaves you less impressed with the bohemians — and more impressed with the courage Jed Perl took in taking the risk to write the novel.
Perl, who turns 75 next month, spent 12 years on and off writing the novel and whittling the story to a fine-tuned minimalist 117 pages.
With perches at the New Republic and New York Review of Books, Perl has spent 40 years as a leading nonfiction art critic. His books include a two-volume biography of Alexander Calder and a 2022 culture-matters manifesto called Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts.
In other words, he’d mastered the nonfiction art of art writing.
Then he took on the harder task of writing a believable novel that matters. He hadn’t written a novel before.
Hence the 12 years and nonstop whittling.
In We Never Called It Frisco, Perl took a new (fictional) approach to themes he has spent his life exploring. The book traces efforts of a poet/small-press publisher named Burt to make sense of the life of his lover Marcia Lang after she suddenly collapses to death (while still in her 40s) at “yet another farewell tour by Martha Graham.” Lang has unexpectedly left her house to Burt to inherit.
The novel unfolds as a gradual piecing together of a portrait of a person who now lives in the past, much like the piecing together of a review of a painting after staring at it for hours. Nothing dramatic happens in the book beyond Marcia’s quick demise. Burt combs through his memories, through Marcia’s letters and unfinished manuscript, to try to understand what drove her and her place in the broader world of art and art criticism. As Burt gets closer to the answer, Perl slides unannounced into Marcia’s voice (through chapters consisting of her writing, in the first person), then back to Burt’s.
Technically, this is a story about another time, specific to a place: The Bay Area in the 1950s and early ‘60s.
More broadly, it’s a story about the role of art critics, of art criticism, of outsiders. Marcia makes her name as a takedown artist. She skewers artists, exhibits, fashionable trends. She does take risks — moving to New York, then Rome, to try to make it bigger, taking on high-profile magazine and book assignments. But her steely sophisticated put-down pose and approach to life embody the opposite of risk, of courage. It’s playing it safe.
Reading the story, following Marcia and Burt through their social milieu, I struggled to see the point of their work. Marcia doesn’t seem to think deeply or care much about the philosophical concepts she critiques. Her blunt iconoclastic salvos do get our attention and want us to read more, but leave us empty without evidence of idealism driving the outraged disappointment.
From her Bertolt Brecht takedown: “I’m sick of polemics. Isn’t everybody sick of polemics? And I’m sick to death of the bright, cold white light that bathes the new Brecht productions. In their own way those klieg lights are as bland and banal as the show play that was all the rage among avant-garde theater groups before the war.”
Her dismissal of an Art Nouveau show at the Museum of Modern Art: “This is Art Nouveau cleaned up, ready for a Madison Avenue ad campaign … The Modern show is Art Nouveau for grinds, not hipsters. I’m not saying the hipsters really understand Beardsley, Gaudi, Mackintosh, or Buimard, but I’m not sure Peter Selz, who organized the show, does either.”
Yes, the delicious takedown review is a valuable (and largely now abandoned) art. It holds up an independent lens to our culture. The writing is a work of art in itself. But we don’t get to read much that Marcia wrote that would suggest a valuable use of that technique (rather than pure ego and quest for self-advancement). We don’t get to read the joyous discovery of inspiring art and ideas that rings doubly true in the context of the takedown critic’s general skepticism.
It all feels cold. It feels grasping. Pretentious. Self-delusional.
Marcia seems to nail the emptiness in this take of her 1940s Bay Area bohemian milieu (and the generation before it):
Thinking about it now it seems to me that we were, like that earlier generation, in almost equal parts authentic, artificial, and absurd. Which gives me some sympathy for the old farts and all their ambiguities. When our gang gets together I look around and I begin to suspect that if you gave us another twenty or thirty years we’d look like those geezers at Vanessi’s.
Does Frisco capture this dynamic, or perpetuate it?
Often in slow-paced, understated fiction, we get the payoff at a climactic moment. Passion, idealism that had boiled beneath the surface explodes into view. We discover something.
In Frisco, that discovery happens in the final three pages. Burt receives a plea for monetary help (from Marcia’s estate) from the troubled daughter of a lover who went with Marcia to Rome and then ditched her. It turned out Marcia had promised before her death to take care of her ex’s daughter (named Cynthia). Which demonstrated a side of Marcia that was unseen through the rest of the book (and her life):
Marcia regarded Cynthia as some kind of lost soul. And Marcia had a fascination, sometimes bordering on obsession, with people and things that were lost or in danger of being lost. A lot of people missed that side of her writing. They never got beyond her braggadocio. But somewhere in her there was an element of regret, a nostalgia for something truer, realer, more authentic. If she hadn’t believed in that something I don’t think she would have ever bothered to sit down and write. She saw the world of artists and writers and their work — it was the only world she really knew — as a house of mirrors. She loved it and hated it. She wanted to smash the mirror, see what was really there. Some desire to get to the bottom of things …
And a page later, in Frisco’s penultimate paragraph, Perl/Burt declares that Marcia was dedicated to “defending” “Oscar Wilde’s art-for-art’s-sake.”
That blindsided me; I hadn’t picked up breadcrumbs earlier in the story that would in retrospect lead to that conclusion. I wasn’t convinced.
Again, that seemed like the point.
Then I spoke with Jed Perl. It seems he was more convinced.
The conversation with Perl took place last week on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Perl told me he chose the mid-20th century Bay Area as the novel’s setting because he lived there as a teen. His parents, academics, “knew some bohemian sorts, some artists and writers in San Francisco and in Berkeley. So I got to know some of those people when I was in my teens. I’ve always been fascinated by that world and wanted to do something about it.”
Late in writing Frisco, when it was ready for galleys, Perl said, he realized that Burt’s and Marcia’s relationship “was a little more distant and chilly” than he meant it to be. So he “warmed up their relationship a little bit” for the final draft.
He saw parts of himself both in laid-back Burt and in piranha Marcia. Like Marcia, he has thrown his share of neutron bombs in ledes in his takedown reviews. (“People sometimes meet me and say, ‘Wow you’re a laid-back guy. You seem like a nice person. I didn’t think you were going to be that way.’”)
He intended Marcia to “partly represent a kind of passionate criticism. She loves it or she hates it — we sometimes get too little of [that] today.”
He sought to raise in Frisco questions about “the relationship between the passionate feelings we have about art and what might be called the ‘mechanics’ of art and of criticism, and the relationship between art and the rest of our lives.”
The art set’s passionate battles in the mid-20th century — explored in this novel — could get “ridiculous and personal,” Perl acknowledged. But they also challenged people’s views. They helped hone people’s ideas.
Readers may or may not come away from Perl’s novel with that conclusion. Which means that he succeeded in dressing a nuanced nonfiction debate in a novel’s clothing.
A brave, and passionate, pivot, I would argue, for a septuagenarian writer who admits to not having figured it all out.
Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with author Jed Perl. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to download the WNHH FM app.
