Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück
Published 1995 · 48,400 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Jack the Modernist to read?
Jack the Modernist scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Theory vocabulary spliced with explicit description.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Long sentences switching register without warning.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- A love affair treated as a problem in poetics.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with theory inside the narrative.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- A narrator called Bob Glück who keeps interrupting to theorise himself.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- Sustained figuration throughout.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Constant distance between experience and its analysis.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The affair ends; the questions do not.
- Structural complexity: 75 out of 100
- Narrative, essay and criticism interleaved.
How Jack the Modernist is regarded
Jack the Modernist holds a literary regard score of 44 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.