Speedboat

Literary fiction

Print length: 178 pagesVintage Books, 1984

Description

Renata Adler’s Speedboat is a modernist novel built as a fragmentary account of Jen Fain, a young journalist living in New York City. Rather than following a single continuous plot, it assembles brief scenes, observations, recollections, and encounters from Jen’s life. The shifts in subject and setting reflect the way experience arrives in pieces and how a narrator selects meaning from them. Adler’s compressed, alert prose keeps attention on Jen’s perceptions as work, relationships, city life, and memory pass through view. The result is less a conventional life story than a collage of consciousness in motion.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Experimental · Fragmentary · Spare · Witty

Pace

Variable

Tone

Cerebral · Detached · Irreverent · Reflective

Structure

Fragmented · Nonlinear · Vignettes

Focus

Character · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 5 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

IdentityIsolationLoveMemoryWork

About Renata Adler

Renata Adler is an American novelist, journalist, and critic whose work moves between fiction, reporting, institutional memoir, and cultural argument. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and briefly the chief film critic of The New York Times, she has written about politics, war, civil rights, cinema, and the inner life of magazines. Her prose is compressed and exact, with a reporter’s attention to telling particulars and a persistent distrust of smooth explanations. In Speedboat, the life of journalist Jen Fain emerges through brief scenes, recollections, jokes, and abrupt changes of subject rather than a continuous plot. Pitch Dark applies a similarly fragmented method to an affair, following Kate Ennis as she tests and revises her account through questions, misunderstandings, and shifts of place. Adler’s nonfiction can be denser and more openly argumentative. Gone draws on her experience at The New Yorker to examine William Shawn’s editorial influence and the atmosphere of the institution he shaped.

Pitch dark Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Vintage Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780394727530

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