Renata Adler
Speedboat
Hachette, originally published 1976
A novel unlike anything that came before it that changed all that came after it - a cult classic for readers of Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Ben Lerner and Anne Carson
When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late '70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before.
It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind.
Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it.
A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthral a new generation of readers.
With an introduction by Hilton Als
About the Author
Renata Adler was born in Milan and raised in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. from Harvard, a D.d E.S from the Sorbonne, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.D. (honorary) from Georgetown. Adler became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1963 and, except for a year as the chief film critic of the New York Times, remained at the New Yorker for the next four decades. Her books include A Year In the Dark, Toward A Radical Middle, Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland V. CBS et al., Sharon V. Time, Canaries in the Mineshaft, Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker, Irreparable Harm: the Supreme Court and the Decision That Made George W. Bush President, and the novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark.