by Renata Adler
Speedboat was the solution.
By turns journalistic, diaristic, aphoristic, always episodic and mordant, Speedboat is a novel made up of a series of sharply observed miniatures rendered aslant. Although at times it can seem these miniatures are deployed, to paraphrase Borges, arbitrarily and in no special order, like the things one sees in dreams, they are in truth organized in subtle and inevitable patterns, also like things in dreams. Because Speedboat is a novel without obvious beginning or end, one in which narrative progress is measured less in terms of event than by incisively rendered detail, and where a mere fragment of dialogue may indicate that everything has changed, it has sometimes been lumped into that dreariest of categories: experimental fiction.
Better and truer to say that the novel has a unique power to produce what Donald Barthelme described admiringly as “glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life.” And if in Speedboat those glimpses captured the white light of flares signaling general cultural distress…well, consider that in 1976, the year Speedboat was published, the Irish Republican Army exploded bombs in the West End of London; the publishing heiress Patty Hearst, a k a Tanya, was sentenced to jail for her part in armed robberies undertaken by the improbable revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army; Steve Jobs founded a company that manufactured machines that would forever alter our relationship to the consumption of information (and everything else); and Jimmy Carter became the first candidate from the Deep South to gain the presidency since the Civil War.
The 1970s were the morning-after of the 1960s—its hangover. The confusions and discontents of that strange and in many ways benighted decade form the background against which Speedboat came into being. And they also provide some insight into the frequent claim that it is written in a voice of dread and with a signature “panic tone.”
For panic, though, why not read deadpan? Speedboat is, after all, a book in which the narrator, Jen Fain, a feckless young journalist seemingly incapable of forming anything like a real romantic attachment, or posing a direct question, or even picking up the newspaper in the morning without encountering a moral quandary in the form of a vagrant passed out in the vestibule, nevertheless draws a consistent bead on life’s quiddities.
The cast of her world—that is, New York City—and book is wildly assorted: a polo-playing Argentinean existential psychiatrist; a Scrabble-playing Begum; a journalist with sources so good inside the intelligence community that his distrustful employers banish him to a suburban edition. There are women with imaginary lovers. There are mangy and lovable and always misunderstood dogs. There are young girls who, short of both cash and intellectual confidence, cadge cab fare and cultural passions from friends. There are sauntering rats caught in peripheral vision; newspaper hacks; a linguistic pedant who thinks that to have named a thing correctly is “to cut its nails and hair, and pocket them, and put the adversary in his power.”
In the latter case the instinct is, Jen says, “entirely modern: to impress on everything that passed his way Joel’s word for it, his personal bureaucratic rubber stamp.”
Speedboat does that also, stamping contemporary consciousness with its singular mark. Because the book prefigured by decades certain telegraphic forms of communication we now take for granted, it is easy to miss the point that Speedboat got there well before e-mails or Facebook or Twitter. Adler had grown up reading nineteenth-century novelists and they had shaped her; yet she found she was not able to work in traditional forms herself. And thus Speedboat is a book without suspense or anything like a distinct plot, a novel whose protagonist is one whose telephone conversations often sound like dialogue from Beckett, whose relationship to violence is abstract, whose ear is always bent to capture the antic and sadly comical cocktail-party blather of late twentieth-century urban life. It is a book in which time and tense are unstable, event is compressed, morality subject to constant revision, under pressure of situational torque.
“I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now,” the novelist David Shields, who heaped praise on Speedboat, once wrote. In Reality Hunger, Shields argued in favor of a fiction assembled from the scraps and shreds of existence, the stuff we find in our experiential pockets and the stuff that finds us. Yet Speedboat, for all its apparent randomness, its Pik-Up-Stiks quality, is deeply patterned, less a collage of scraps than something closer to a musical mashup.
In his book Postproduction Culture, the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud argues for the idea of the deejay as the dominant cultural figure of our time, and with its deft cutting and splicing, abrupt tonal shifts, subtle repetitions, inherent impatience, urgent rhythm, and jagged dissonances, Speedboat deploys basic deejay strategies. Distrustful of long forms—suites, albums, Great Works—and unconvinced that they were an effective way of rendering the jitters of life in the late twentieth century, Adler conjured a novel whose angular brilliance is how deftly it sampled the sounds and rhythms of contemporary life.
“The deejay thing makes sense to me,” Adler told me. “Music, particularly music with melody, has direct access to a whole range of feeling, which strictly modernist or atonal music does not. Traditional, classic fiction could also address that entire range of thought and feeling; soap operas can reach it. But strict high-modernist fiction tends to dismiss most appeals to emotion, sentiment, caring about characters and what happens to them, as cheap, as kitsch, and stays in a chilly range. Irony, humor, frissons of shock, a certain wistful, rueful quality, but that’s it. Nothing to make you cry, care about characters, want things for them. You couldn’t be, say, Dickens now, or George Eliot, or Henry James. Or maybe you could write like them, with luck, but it would not be true to our time, false somehow. For those effects you have to go back to the originals. I love modernist effects, but I mean Kafka, though perfect, is frosty. So I wondered, is there a way, in these times, to get conventional feeling in there? I don’t think I managed, except sporadically, until Pitch Dark. Maybe not even then.”
“In Speedboat, something odd kept happening,” Adler told me. “Once I had an anecdote, and my intention was to keep going until I reached the whole point, my reason for telling it, I noticed that well before I got to what had seemed to me the point, I stopped. In retrospect, I had this image, which may be an uneducated image, of biting off the thread. I mean, I think the Fates did that. The thread tightens and at a point in a life they bite it off. I was biting off the thread before the thing I was writing, the part of the story, the anecdote, was done.”
The threads held by the Fates, of course, were the puppet strings of mortal life. The Fates toyed with their protagonists, as novelists do, until they wearied of them and time came to cut the thread and pack them off to the well of souls.
“What is the point,” Jen says in Speedboat. The sentence is not a question. “That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind….Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.” Vigilant skepticism, a deep dubiety, is probably the strongest and certainly the most modern current of feeling in Speedboat: doubt, after all, is writing. The elegance, the enduring freshness of Speedboat is no mystery when you consider it a novel that not infrequently calls into question the moral of the story and, often enough, the story itself.
—GUY TREBAY
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