Speedboat (NYRB Classics) Paperback – March 19, 2013

This strangely wonderful novel isnt for every reader as it has no real plot, no conventionally constructed characters, nothing but an oddly appealing first-person narrator with a quirky sensibility & an intelligent take on a broad range of things. It could be accused of being a messy ragbag of a book, only it's written in punchy short bursts of spare prose, clean & concise even when most off-the-wall, & weighing in at 170 pages, this is a light-heavyweight contender. It was written in the '70s, but it feels contemporary as if it were fresh out of the box. Any of you serious readers of modern prose fiction ought to check this out. Renata Adler is a whip-smart unconventional prose artist.

SPEEDBOAT is a very good book.It's usually classified as a novel.I'd question that categorization.The book has no plot and only in a superficial sense does it have characters.It's a collage of literary fragments, brilliantly organized but not following any discernible pattern or progression.All the fragments ostensibly come from or concern the narrator , someone apparently named Jen Fain.Jen strikes me as an artifice.These are the ramblings of Renata Adler.I suspect she found she really couldn't write a novel and came up with this instead.It works because page after page it's filled with stunning anecdotes,insights and occasional bursts of humor.One thought that recurred to me while reading this book is, who does a writer write for?The 'artsy" answer is , for himself.True and good , up to a point but no one other than secret diarists imagine that they have no audience(even the secret diarist fantasizes about being read).SPEEDBOAT was not written for the intelligent, common reader , whoever she may be.It's very New Yorky.Adler uses names and neighborhoods as signifiers.You have references to Elaines,Trader Vics,Bendel,Saks and the Village.These names have meanings that you know or don't know.Her people are almost all highly educated cosmopolitans who when not in New York flit from Angkor Wat to Mediterranean islands.This is a way of writing that is in sharp contrast to any number of traditional novelists.For some reason,I kept thinking of Thomas Hardy.Hardy's most famous novels have a definite geographic setting, the mythical Wessex( a fictionalized version of The Dorset of his youth that expanded with time).I don't think Hardy expected Wessexer's to read his books or thought you needed to know much about Wessex to understand them.This is not the case with Adler.I can't imagine a lot of people outside of relatively sophisticated circles familiar with New York reading or getting much pleasure out of this book .Let's face it , it's really a narrow book .That is not a bad thing but it's a limiting thing.There is an afterword by Guy Trebay that tries to do for the book what the evangelists of abstract expressionism tried to do for Pollock That is make it into a historical inevitability.The form of SPEEDBOAT is an expression of the zeitgeist.Hence , it is truer and better than other books of the time. Progressivist, dialectical nonsense !This book doesn't need to rest on that kind of silliness.Any writer worth a damn would be proud to produce a book this good and fresh .In that sense , she made it new.(although I don't want to get started on the fetishism of "newness").

Speedboat is not an experience for the faint of heart. Set in 1970s NYC as a fictional memoir, Renata Adler's novel takes montage to a semantic extreme that somehow becomes indistinguishable from lived reality. Beyond the patchwork of short, barely connected episodes, Adler's mastery of montage infuses every word until even the most obvious phrases become miracles of combination, revealing the wonder of language at the very moment that the sum of its parts creates a larger sense. Then again, maybe sense is too strong a word. Behind Adler's technique lies an unsettling understanding of the world in which all meaning beyond episodic observation is denied and even the most rudimentary social narrative is rejected.It's easy to connect Adler's free-falling prose to the social malaise of America in the `70s, but it might be more helpful to point out that Speedboat's lack of narrative stability is a perfect analog for a new expansive social reality, a space and time that simply doesn't make sense in the old ways but which hasn't yet created its own stories. This is what the new world looked like to someone who had one foot in the old one: strange, barely intelligible, full of opportunities and disappointments, and finally, worth passing on to another generation. Acerbic and optimistic, Adler reminds us that new social contracts are not without unintended consequences and that constructing meaning remains the most revolutionary of all social endeavors: a time consuming process undertaken one day at a time, one person at a time, one word at a time.

I like to read classic books so I thought I would give this a go. The style is stream of consciousness or short unconnect episodes, but without an obvious plot. I found this style is a bit to modern and to good for me. But the book does cover 1970s issues and attitudes. The book is short and well written so you can give it a good and finish the book quickley and move on.

Cryptic, revelatory, epiphanic.Seventeen more words required, so: Prophetic, gnomic, continental, prismatic, the fragments of an inner life reflected in triplicate.

I abandoned this book after reading about 20% of it. The writing is good, but I found it closer to stream-of-consciousness than to the novel form. Every few pages contained completely random anecdotes. I was at first interested to see where this would go, but I seemed to be reading only random, though well-written, snippets of ideas, and the incidents seemed unconnected. I just lost interest.

A novel - told with bits of memory - in discontinuous time - as if the main character is remembering events from her life - beginning at a point near the beginning, moving forward, coming back, moving forward again - - - Alain Robbe-Grillet in For A New Novel suggested writers should be thinking and looking ahead, for a novel that fits with the era in which they live, rather than looking back and trying to write like some noted author of the past - that those authors of the past wrote to their era, we should write to ours. Renata Adler did that. She captured the time, the moment, the era, exactly. Perfectly. I love this book.

Great book highly recommend :) sometimes cynical but always floating on the surface

Superb!

Un libro sorprendente, hecho de digresiones, muy personal, encantador. No conocía nada de su autora, pero he disfrutado mucho leyéndolo. Recomendable para los que buscan algo más que esparcimiento o pasatiempos insulsos.

Macht Spaß die Geschichten/Gedanken dieser Frau zu folgen. Hat ihre eigene Art und auch eine Menge Sarkasmus die Welt und die Menschen zu beschreiben.

As another reviewer notes, this isn't a novel. It's a series of vignettes, really, but they're all so beautifully written that you get transported into the moment, and then released into another, just as quickly.I love it, personally. It's the kind of book to dip into, here and there.