Renata Adler

This novel gives voice to the experiences and feelings of discontinuity in modern life through a series of vignettes which follow the life and travels of Jen Fain, a beautiful and intelligent journalist

Speedboat

"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboatcharged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of every man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension, and it is the story of Jen Fein, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Her voice is cuttingly perceptive, darkly funny, and always fiercely intelligent as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it. This new edition of Speedboatwill include an interview between Renata Adler and Guy Trebay discussing the genesis and composition of the book. enata Adler's collage novel Speedboatcaptivates by its jagged and frenetic changes of pitch and tone and voice. She confides, reflects, tells a story, aphorizes, undercuts the aphorism, then undercuts that. If she's cryptic in one paragraph, she's clear in the next. She changes subjects like a brilliant schizophrenic, making irration

Trever

Why did this get removed from my books? idk. Anyway, I liked this book when I read it last year.

“I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.” 

I liked it but it could have been shorter. I think it's definitely overrated.

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthrall a new generation of readers.

Gary Homewood

Autobiographical vignettes of a 1970s New York journalist. Fragments of journalism, diary, conversations and aphorisms as a convincing portrayal of its confused era. Seemingly unrelated parts beautifully written and meticulously crafted, often with a mordant wit. Wide shifts of tone and voice, but with subtle echoes and thematic links.
Accessible, distinct and successful experimental fiction, highly enjoyable. Not often you see those words in the same sentence!

Speedboat

Reviews