We Never Called It Frisco

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 His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco.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.