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"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboat, Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, charged 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 searching, cuttingly perceptive, and darkly funny as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it"--… (more)
Plot: none. Arch: some. Characters: none interesting. Anecdotes: some amusing. Ennui of the privileged: vraiment.
Less a story than an image of a time presented experimentally through usually short (3 line - one page) anecdotes. The reader learns little about any character; the goal of the novel instead is for the reader to gain an understanding of the fractured, uncertain but materially well-off world the characters inhabit. "Malaise" is a cliched term for the period of the late 1970s before Reagan appeared to sweep all that away, but it would apply here, in a more existential sense than an economic one.
Adler is sometimes hilariously biting about the strata of society she is writing about, in a slightly meaty passage:
The concept of the jig itself being up, however, had retreated into thrillers. Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.
or in a one-liner:
At twenty-six, Kate, though not promiscuous, had slept with most of the decent men in public life.
In the end, despite the occasional amusements, I am unsatisfied. Fiction remains for me about telling stories and creating character, and I remain unconvinced by the plotless novel. ( )
comes off to me like the wine-drunk divorcee aunt of Reena Spaulings with all implications it carries - old money, haughty, vain, mildly reactionary, genuinely entertaining - in a way that i cant get too mad at because of how perfectly these qualities suit the character, but am also not super eager to spend additional time with. i guess. ( )
This book is fabulous! I was not expecting to love it as much as I did—I had no expectations, in fact, knowing nothing about it going in—and I found it utterly fabulous! The prose is so sharp and intriguing, leading one into the most curious inferences, most curious avenues of thought. It characterizes an era without the painstaking task of depicting that era—without, as Anne Carson says, “the boredom of a story.” It is dazzling, funny and educational; it reminded me of just how fun reading can be. I wish I could read it for the first time again. ( )
"What war?" said the Prime Minister sharply. "No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told...." And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return. -Evenlyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
Dedication
For A.
First words
Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written - disrupting a cliche and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love - you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've got the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. -Castling
"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboat, Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, charged 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 searching, cuttingly perceptive, and darkly funny as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it"--
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Book description
read the first chapter really got the cool thing but could make almost no sense of most of the things she might or might not refer to nor what the point of any of the story fragments she wrote is
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Less a story than an image of a time presented experimentally through usually short (3 line - one page) anecdotes. The reader learns little about any character; the goal of the novel instead is for the reader to gain an understanding of the fractured, uncertain but materially well-off world the characters inhabit. "Malaise" is a cliched term for the period of the late 1970s before Reagan appeared to sweep all that away, but it would apply here, in a more existential sense than an economic one.
Adler is sometimes hilariously biting about the strata of society she is writing about, in a slightly meaty passage: or in a one-liner:In the end, despite the occasional amusements, I am unsatisfied. Fiction remains for me about telling stories and creating character, and I remain unconvinced by the plotless novel. (