Not for the faint of mind. Renata Adler was big time — an American author, journalist, film critic, and onetime writer-reporter-staffer for The New Yorker. She also ruled as chief film critic at The New York Times. During the mid-1970s, Adler wrote what she dubbed “fiction,” a novel that became a best-seller, called Speedboat. That was forty-seven years ago; it was a new book that changed the definition of fiction. It even altered the way I wanted to write. And now, it might change me one more time.
Like nothing before it, Speedboat splashed on the scene disregarding the novel’s rules, including those I’d learned. Yet, reading it was a pleasure. Its voice — ambivalent, curious, wry, and occasionally self-deprecating — was that of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the uneven, unpredictable landscape of contemporary America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill her observations from the universe as heroine Jen viewed it. And Jen’s beau happened to be named Jim, no kin. (More on him, later.) I wondered as a young guy “How did Adler know what she knew?” I’m reminded of a Peter Matz-Barbra Streisand song where Babs references “A man who won't ask how I learned what I know…”. I’m asking.
Speedboat received critical acclaim, snagging the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best debut work by an American fiction writer. The outsized prize was judged by E. L. Doctorow, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, not chopped liver. The off-beat novel was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award, again, no small thing. Being a curious guy, I questioned and now ask if she hadn’t been such a high-profile personality in New York and Washington, DC, would this book have received all that glory? Just asking.
It's important to note that even though the book was called ‘a perfect novel’ Adler confessed that “Some of it was real.” I have immodestly said the same of my own seven and one-half not so hot “novels.”
Alas, by the late 1980s, Speedboat was out of print. But in 2013, powerhouse New York Review of Books reissued the onetime best-selling paperback. I got another copy.
So, as a young guy, in the mid-1970s, I read and savored Speedboat. And I admit I longed to emulate Adler’s style of short, pithy, observations, though I questioned her complex credibility (I’m entitled). It’s called ambivalence. How much ambivalence is a writer allowed, if any?
Frequently heard during the 1970s Human Potential Movement, “Uncertainty is a high space.” Today authors have rediscovered that concept and write about it as if they stumbled across it. (See Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) I am functioning in an area they used to call “uncertainty,” back then considered a “high space,” and today some place new.
Recently I had a brainstorm: why not give it a try anyway? Reading the fresh copy, with all my considerations, I realized I was in many ways out of my league (I longed to copy her style anyway.) Mark Twain suggests when in doubt, do it anyway.
It’s all so unusual; so special, a book of dispatches that is episodic, little items, vignettes, tidbits, snippets, (sometimes as short as a line or two) – everything from Alliterative Allusions to Zip-tied Zingers. After a twice-read-tale, and further study, I still don’t know what to call her style, though I feel “dispatches” is classy.
And I’m not sure if it’s incumbent upon me to decide if her unorthodox approach to “fiction” would be acceptable today. Plus — surmising the minutiae in her “novel” is from her life; many times, from her work — maybe there’s a clue in there somewhere for me on how to jump-start my next effort. Hold the phone.
Established before, when published, I repeat, the Adler novel was well-reviewed. It’s imperative to also say here, at the very least, she was extremely well connected. And the book was published by powerful, prestigious New York Review of Books. And let’s not leave out, “Much of the material in the compilation originally appeared in highly regarded The New Yorker.” Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Readers, and not-the-faint-of-brain who have stuck by me, Who am I to question venerable New Yorker magazine?
In addition to all that: this latest printing includes a savvy, smart, stylish, well-thought out afterward by fashion chronicler, Guy Trebay. Trebay had this to say, “Speedboat is a novel made up of a series of sharply observed miniatures rendered aslant… it has sometimes been lumped into that dreariest of categories: experimental fiction…written in a voice of dread and with a signature ‘panic tone.’ …well before e-mails or Facebook or Twitter… for all its apparent randomness, its Pik-Up-Sticks quality, is deeply patterned, less a collage of scraps than something closer to a musical mashup…”
A musical mashup?! That got this aficionado of American Popular Standards attention. A musical mashup… something I can relate to.
Frankly, I admit further I'm in awe of this author’s storehouse, wide range of worldwide wisdom in the writing, and her wider grasp of politics… Her memory... Her ability to cleverly communicate… her originality. Then again, I did not have those dang New York and DC connections. More ambivalence here… admiration: her career as writer-critic, and her ability to freely travel the world and then with a perceptive recollection to toss off tidbits that happened along the way. Who else did that? Graham Greene in Travels with My Aunt? Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame? — neither with the seriousness of Renata Adler.
As I mentioned, her "guy" in the book is “Jim.” Though she’s stingy with details about him, I can report, Jim and I are nothing alike, though I wish I could have accompanied her a time or two on her sojourns. Many novels have a romantic interest for flavor and titillation. We meet her Jim early on and then nevermore. If you introduce a love interest, at least tell us something about him/her so we can salivate! Near the end with a thud, in passing, she drops she might have gotten pregnant. (Later, on that bombshell.) Adler did share this crumb: Jim was in the “O.S.S.” What’s that?
(During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services was the intelligence agency of the United States formed as an appendage of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning. The O.S.S. was dissolved a month after the end of the war.)
Quotes from Speedboat
“…the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep.”
“None of us is leading quite the life we were at all prepared for.”
“I once saw, however, what might have seemed an altogether hopeless old man on crutches, making his way out of Disneyland with a large Mickey Mouse balloon.”
“’The Great Game,’ the lady philosopher used to say, quoting from Kipling, ‘is finished when everyone is dead. Not before.’”
“I do not dream in parables.” Pray tell, what does that mean?!
“Lonely people see double entendres everywhere.” Dr. Ruth, The New York Times — recently hot on the subject — someone out there, explain that to me?
“The thing is, I recognize every literary style at once, and I detest them all.”
“‘When you can’t sleep,’ he said, ‘just tell yourself the story of your life.’”
“By mistake, these past few months, I also teach.” Meant as Exposition and Never mentioned again. Not fair, lady.
“‘Open Admissions’ sounds like an outdoor confessional.”
“In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, ‘You are too hard on yourself.’” This quote deserves boldface, don’t ya’ agree?
“We were younger. We were other people, anyway, in another world.” Huh? Could be a lyric from a mediocre pop song by Judy Collins. Phil Collins. Tom Collins (no ice.)
“The Surveyor moon shot was, in many ways, the best, a coltish tripod on its spindly legs; the first shot its transmitter back to earth was a shy little photo of the shadow of its foot.” I don’t know if this should be included but I liked being reminded of that and would love having to explain it to younger friends, if I had any.
“The Surveyor program was a NASA program that, from June 1966 through January 1968, sent seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Its primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of soft landings on the Moon. The Surveyor craft were the first American spacecraft to achieve soft landing on an extraterrestrial body. The missions called for the craft to travel directly to the Moon on an impact trajectory, a journey that lasted 63 to 65 hours, and ended with a deceleration of just over three minutes to a soft landing.” And then, took a picture of its foot.” All that and a picture of its foot! One wonders how much did THAT photograph cost?
Quotes from Renata Adler
“Once at a Christmas party on Park Avenue, when somebody was reading, beautifully, aloud from Dickens, I began to giggle, uncontrollably. It was that classic. Tiny Tim and his damn crutch.” Does Renata Adler have a lighter side she’s reluctant to tell us about?
“For years now, there have been other, sounder contra-fifties people. Against all that modest, domestication, niceness—Joe Namath, Bobby Fischer, Mark Spitz, Jimmy Connors, Bobby Riggs, Muhammad Ali. For the ladies, well, for the ladies, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Janis Joplin, Anne Sexton, and, after all on another racetrack, Ruffian.” (It was necessary for me to research Ruffian.)
“The sign that Manley Dubois had entered a woman’s life might be the collection of Billie Holiday records… the only man they could trust… When he finally came to write about it, it turned out, strangely, that he had never understood his material at all.” A waste of time, dissecting Billy Holiday, sweetheart. Let Billie Holiday be Billy Holiday.
“She asked whether I would like to participate in a symposium they were having on the female orgasm in fiction. I said, thanks but no… Could I suggest any novels. The ones they had thought of… Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence, and Mrs. Dalloway. I said, Mrs. Dalloway?” Indeed.
“She pointed out she had heard that we smell badly to the Japanese.” [sic, as writ.]
“Scholars and intellectuals make bad jurors, I believe.”
“Everyone doing God’s work is a Jesus creep. It’s a new way of saying Christian, that’s what it is. Mother said, ‘Be that as it may, I don’t care for it.’” Sounds like everybody’s mother.
“It’s not so bad, the professor said. It only isn’t wonderful. Nobody has an obligation to be wonderful.” [NOTE: This is one of the entries in the book that is only a hot line and a half. Style, laziness or being iconic?]
“The serious collages for women were, by contrast, solid. They taught the same courses, without fuss and with a small sigh; they reserved their serious efforts for the medievalist, the true scientists, linguists, other scholars, even the pre-law and pre-medical students, all of whom went out, degree in hand, into the world, and were asked, like their predecessors, whether they could type.” [Reminder, this was the mid-1970s]
“In the matter of jobs, I think I know nine spies. Eight are American. One is foreign…. Each of the nine seems to be liked by everyone except the other eight.”
“Situps [sic] aside, it is possible that we are really a group of invalids, hypochondriacs, and misfits. I don’t know. Even our people who stay fit with yoga seem to be, more than others, subject to the flu.”
“The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way on a one-way street.”
“…violent things are always happening to the very rich, and to the poor, of course. Freak accidents befall the middle classes in their midst.”
“I seem to be about to have Jim’s child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven’t mentioned it to Jim.”
HERE’S THE ENTIRE ENTRY: “The idea of hostages is very deep. Becoming pregnant is taking a hostage — as is running a pawnshop, being a bank, receiving a letter, taking a photograph, or listening to a confidence. Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing. Blackmail, kidnapping, then, are among the extreme violations of the deal. Anyway, I seem to be about to have Jim’s child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven’t mention it to Jim.”
Offbeat words used in Speedboat
Gymkhana - A field held for equestrians; also, autocross, to time sports cars
Snaffle - A bit, jointed in the middle, with a ring at each end
Eidetic - Relating to, or constituting visual imagery
Tramontana - A cold wind from the North
Slavering - To buy, sell, or own human beings
Vecu - French for Real-life; personal experience
Sidled - To move sideways or obliquely
Peroration - A long speech characterized by lofty and often pompous language
Importunate - Urgent or persistent in solicitations, sometimes annoying
Schussers - Skiers
Éclaircissement - Clarification; explanation
Entrechat - A jump in which a dancer crosses the feet a number of times while in the air
Peculation - Fraud; larceny
Phenomena, phenomenas, phenomenae, phenomenums - Development, experience, wonder
Quiddities - The quality that makes a thing what it is
End-quote from Speedboat
Summer. The speedboat was serious… The young American wife from Malibu, who had been overexcited about everything since dawn, said she would adore to go… the speed, the boat, began to hit each wave with flat, hard, jarring thuds, like the heel of a hand against a tabletop… while the American lady, in her eagerness, began to bounce with anticipation over every little wave. The board scudded hard; she exaggerated every happy bounce. Until she broke her back.
That’s it for me, I’m letting it all go. Ergo, Alas, and chameleonic lass, know that I’m left to wonder and question what I read, what I feel, and why I want to emulate your style. Yes, I was young, impressionable, certainly naïve. Therefore, I ask, did Renata Adler buffalo all of us — including me — even the folks in Buffalo with her bizarre, unconventionally thrown together “novel?” I don’t know. I do like sharing the book with friends and acquaintances who neither heard of the book that haunted me for decades — NOR Miss Renata Adler. Perhaps Uncertainty is not such a high space after all. I sure wish Renata Adler was still here to go a round or two. I’d buy her dinner.