BOOK REVIEW
Catcher in the Wry: On Renata Adler's Speedboat
Arwin Chan December 10, 2017
“I know exactly what you mean,” said the lady critic, who had been trying to find her way into the conversation somehow.
Has modern life really changed all that much? Sure, from a micro perspective, it seems more rapid than ever. Let me call an Uber; the president just started an international crisis with a tweet. Updates come as soon as they’re sent and become queued down your push notifications. With all this at immediate attention, it becomes easy to forget the truths that have held over time, the ground we’ve covered, the counterculture that’s been established1. Renata Adler’s 1976 novel Speedboat exceptionally touches moments that still resonate well today—a vivid portrait of urban America brilliantly rendered into prose.
The book follows the perspective of journalist Jen Fenn, as she navigates through cocktail parties, interviews, transit and her apartment block. The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no real plot; while some chapters and excerpts carry on longer and more linearly2, short paragraphs are interspersed throughout and break up the narrative. But this is not disorienting, rather, it feels like a highlight reel of Fenn’s mind, observing, as one writer3 puts it, “in that limpid, discarnate New Yorker style—as if the writer’s brains have been preserved in a mason jar, with a single watchful orb of an eyeball floatingly attached.”
Others4 have described the work as dreamlike, but I find it compares more to entries pulled from a journal, or discoveries from the cutting room floor, compiled5. These moments, too periphery to pull into a traditional narrative, still come together to form a poignant portrait of the world around Fenn. It’s undoubtedly a reason why it reads so well under a contemporary lens, considering the fragmented nature of our online posts, that join the feeds we scroll through.
And then there’s the moments themselves:
The host, for some reason, was taking Instamatic pictures of his guests. It was not clear whether he was doing this in order to be able to show, at some future time, that there had been this gathering in his house. Or whether he thought of pictures in some voodoo sense. Or whether he found it difficult to talk. Or whether he was bored.
That quote stood out as particularity relevant, devices considered, but they all seem to call towards the sort of awkward dread that comes with navigating metropolitan life. Children’s personalities clashing in a compulsory ballet class, or being stuck alone with a bus driver who’s reciting bible verses. The moments spoke of the 70’s itself, hungover from the ripe counterculture of the decade prior6, watching as everyone scrambled to reorient. But while writers like Thompson tackled the era with a drug-fueled chase into oblivion7, Adler observed nonchalantly from a distance.
Which brings me to the point of just how cool Renata Adler seems. She’s probably one of the most eloquent and overqualified8 writers I’ve come across; Speedboat reads like the older sibling who’s gone and spent the last year doing the thing that you just discovered was the thing to do. She picks up on moments with a sharpness that’s sobering to read. She’s unrelentingly critical, and the narrator even spends a few paragraphs dissecting her coworkers’ vernacular. Reflection, garnished with dry wit.
“Nerve-shattering,” “eye-popping,” “bone-crushing”—the responsive critic was a crushed, impaled, electrocuted man. “Searing” was lukewarm.
A final takeaway; while its fragmented storyline would classify it as experimental fiction, it is not particularly inaccessible or pretentious. The issue I have with a lot of experimental work from the 60’s to 80’s is that it ends up mocking the reader more than show the absurdity it’s describing, “like, how completely banal of you to expect that9, here’s some metafiction to wrap your head around”. But Speedboat doesn’t put you down, and the point isn’t to show off how capable the writer is. It’s as funny as it is breath-taking, and it’s also the first novel from one of the most interesting voices I’ve read of late. If there’s any doubt left, just pick up a copy and let the first paragraph sweep you off your feet.
– Arwin
1 “Skateboarders are old,” I discussed with one of the managers at the office.
2 Islands felt the most cohesive, though certainly not the strongest.
3 Parker, J. “Renata Adler: Troll or Treasure?” The Atlantic. May 2015 Issue.
4 O’Rouke, M. “Welcome Back, Renata Adler.” New Yorker. March 11, 2013.
5 It sort of reminds me of the collage-style documentary Cameraperson, but with more substance and published four decades prior.
6 Trebay, G. Afterword for Speedboat.
7 Though Fear and Loathing has its own place of significance for me.
8 B.A. (Bryn Mawr), M.A. (Harvard), D.d’E.S (Sorbonne), J.D. (Yale). Thought you had a nice CV? Sucker.
9 Paraphrased from Wallace’s point on irony, see E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.