WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO

In the wake of his lover’s death, a long-time San Francisco art-scene insider curates her final words on the subjects of culture and belonging.

Marcia Lang is a force to be reckoned with. The only child of Jewish entrepreneurs who left Berlin just ahead of the Third Reich, Marcia has an indomitable sense of self that transcends her parents’ expectations that she marry, have children, and tend to her writing ambitions on the side. Instead, she becomes the “bossy, sometimes overbearing” center of a group of young bohemians attending Berkeley in the late 1940s. There, alongside a revolving coterie of artists, poets, and puppeteers, Marcia builds a name for herself as a keen cultural critic, deeply invested in the San Francisco scene. That is, until she commits the ultimate left-coast sin and leaves San Francisco for a career in New York City, where she becomes the kind of critic who can make an artist’s career by giving them “the full Marcia Lang treatment,” even if she’s tearing their work to shreds. Newly returned to California and predicted to be “the voice of the decade,” Marcia unexpectedly dies during the intermission of “yet another farewell tour by Martha Graham,” leaving her lover, Burt, himself a poet and publisher, the job of completing Marcia’s “coffee-table book for intelligentsia” about the postwar San Francisco scene. What follows is a pastiche of Marcia’s catty, colloquial, and piercing observations interspersed with Burt’s own more laconic takes on the same parties, happenings, and arguments. Perl, a celebrated art critic who has charted the course of more than one movement himself, provides an expert’s eye for the nuance of both the art’s making and its philosophy. However, as a novel interested in the nuance of a relationship between two people—one a firebrand who burns out too soon, the other left to navigate his loss in the wash of her immortal opinions—the book does not live up to the potential of its premise. Like Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve or John Berger’s A Painter of Our Time, Perl’s debut novel could be both an astute critique and an affecting Künstlerroman for the critic-as-artist, but the balance of the book’s attention lies on the side of criticism rather than character development; a missed opportunity that hopefully serves as a call for this insightful and often delightful author to try again.

A flashy, astute read for knowledgeable lovers of American art history.