Pitch Dark by Renata Adler

First published: 1983

Type of plot: Novel of manners

Time of work: 1981, with flashbacks reaching to the early 1960’s

Locale: Connecticut; Ireland, near Dublin; Orcas Island, off Bellingham, Washington

Principal Characters:

• Kate Ennis, a writer and the narrator of the story
• Jake, her married lover

The Novel

The unconventional, oblique narrative method of Pitch Dark makes plot summary difficult and tentative, but the novel’s division into three sections—“Orcas Island,” “Pitch Dark,” and “Home”—provides a helpful structure.

Kate Ennis, the narrator, tells the first part of her story from Orcas Island, but the events described take place in New England. “Orcas Island,” like the other two sections, weaves together Kate’s painful musings on her recent affair with Jake, her married neighbor, with a skein of incidents featuring people from Kate’s past. Characters come onstage only to walk off forever, and promising themes sound once and fade away. Many of the quick shots of the past focus on college days (Harvard and Radcliffe, apparently, since one student is experimenting with psylocybin “under the guidance of [Timothy] Leary and [Richard] Alpert”), offering entertaining glimpses of teachers and fellow students.

The stream of Kate’s consciousness darts here and there. Some passages turn into minilectures on themes from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Vladimir Nabokov, for example, while one sparkling gloss on Homer reveals that Penelope “did not unweave by night, and therefore by implication hardly ever wove by day.” A puzzling reference on page eighteen to something called “London Exit” is amplified in a brief essay introduced fifteen pages later, but the “rich Italians” and the old people who “moved to the suburbs” are suspended in narrative limbo. Leander Dworkin, “the amplifying poet,” and Willie Stokes, “the poet of compression,” seem to have bright futures, but their complementary sensibilities wither away as they are buried in the narrator’s flow of reminiscence.

Never far from Kate’s mind is her recent break from her lover. Kate is apparently about forty, and in “Orcas Island” she has for some time improvised a home in a barn that is perhaps in rural Connecticut (it is a “long drive to the city”). Jake, a lawyer and a country neighbor, may be about fifteen years older than Kate—or at least she speaks of having planned to leave him on or about his thirty-fifth anniversary. Their affair has gone on for eight years, and much of the hurt that Kate feels centers on Jake’s never having taken her anywhere on a trip. Jake has always traveled with his family to the Caribbean for Christmas, but, as the Other Woman, Kate has had to subsist on his leftover time. (“Somehow not with me, not with me.”) The “Orcas Island” section ends with Kate wondering, “But what am I going to do, what shall I do, now?”

Section 2, “Pitch Dark,” is also composed on Orcas Island, but is set in Ireland, near Dublin. It is the most unified and coherent of the three sections, but was probably written separately and grafted on to the story of Kate and Jake. (In one scene in which she wants a name very like her own, the narrator comes up not with a variant of Ennis but with “Alder.”) When Kate leaves Jake, she flies to Ireland, rents a car, and seeks out the estate offered her by a wealthy American acquaintance. Much of her journey is made in pitch dark, and it involves a very minor traffic mishap in which she is apparently used as the instrument of an insurance scam. Kate is unduly frightened by the incident and, thinking she is in trouble with the law, pursues a course of trivial evasive actions to avoid apprehension. Her brief stay at her friend’s home is no more satisfying. The servants’ boorishness evokes paranoid suspicions, and Kate makes a nightmarish drive to a dinner party with strangers. These events unfold with brief pauses for the echoing of several obscure verbal motifs, as well as the playing back in her mind of persistent questions about Jake and their romance. The section ends with Kate in London and Jake on the phone to her.

In section 3, “Home,” Kate is living in a small house in a Connecticut town. The time is more than two years after her misadventures in Ireland. The Orcas Island interlude is behind her, and she is living comfortably with Jake. (“By then, we had long been to Orcas Island, New Orleans, God knows where.”) Aside from the abrupt comments that allow the reader to piece together the happy ending to the love story, “Home” is, like “Orcas Island,” a series of discontinuous accounts of local events, essays on legal matters (the whole novel reveals a preoccupation with the law and laws), more streams of reminiscence, lectures on literature (Thomas Wolfe and Gertrude Stein seen very clearly), and more. Much of it is witty, engaging chitchat despite its lack of unity—a judgment that applies to each section as well as to the novel as a whole. In sum, Pitch Dark tells an ordinary love story in a sometimes annoying, indirect way but decks it out with appealing side glances at whatever catches the author’s alert eye.

The Characters

Pitch Dark rejects conventional characterizations, offering instead bursts of narrative from which the reader must deduce character. Kate Ennis emerges as a sensitive, intelligent, long-suffering heroine. The many digressions reveal where Kate comes from, where she is now, and where she hopes to be in the future. The characters are not so much described as experienced through Kate’s consciousness. The Ireland story in the second section shows Kate in a state of paranoia, suggesting that her mental stability has been threatened by the upheaval in her love life. The sinister inscrutability of the servants and villagers in Ireland reinforces her sense of helplessness.

Jake is presented as an insensitive, vacillating, self-centered man who takes Kate’s love for granted. His actions slowly force Kate to realize that his love for her is diminishing. When she seeks his assistance in some maintenance problems with her house and pond, he refuses even to share with her the names of reliable workmen he has used at his own place. This selfish disregard for her problems prompts these thoughts: “And though I know my heart cannot have been broken in these things, these things of my house and of yours. . . , I find that I am crying as I write. . . .” Similarly, he refuses to take her on any trips during those eight years of their romance. (She had had her heart set especially on a visit to New Orleans: “Would it have cost him all the earth, sometime in all those years, to take her to New Orleans for a week?”) Jake remains, ultimately, a vague presence in the background. His importance is clear, but his character and personality remain thoroughly problematic.

Many of the other characters, brief as their bit appearances are, shine vividly on the page, but none of them takes on full flesh and blood.

Critical Context

Critical response to Adler’s style has been mixed. Like Pitch Dark, her first novel, Speedboat (1976), consists of a sequence of disconnected passages which force the reader to impose a pattern from his or her own imagination. Such a work is hardly a novel in the conventional sense of the term, but critical reaction to Speedboat was quite favorable on the whole. Adler’s volume of essays Toward a Radical Middle (1970) also received excellent notices, and much of the commentary in her fiction should probably be related to her journalistic work. Speedboat had the advantage of being new, and its methods enjoyed the attention that attends on novelty, but in Pitch Dark her approach had to sway by its own innate virtues. Just how much pleasure a reader takes in these novels will depend finally on how much pleasure from conventional narrative continuity he or she is willing to sacrifice in return for Adler’s freshness and distinct talent for the impressive quick sketch.

Bibliography

Adler, Renata. Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism. New York: Random House, 1970. The essays collected here and, more especially, Adler’s introduction provide useful background to understanding Adler’s politics and her and Kate’s generation.

Commonweal. CXI, June, 1984, p. 345.

Epstein, Joseph. “The Sunshine Girls.” Commentary 77 (June, 1984): 62-67. This review of Pitch Dark and Didion’s Democracy offers a critical overview of two writers whom Epstein faults for their fragmented narrative structure and their unearned pessimism.

Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Although Greene does not even mention Adler directly, her study offers an excellent theoretical and practical model for reading Pitch Dark in terms of innovative women’s fiction.

Harper’s. CCLXVIII, February, 1984, p. 76.

Kornbluth, Jesse. “The Quirky Brilliance of Renata Adler.” New York 16 (December 12, 1983): 34-40. An invaluable profile of a writer about whose life little is known outside the New York cultural circle. In his remarks on Pitch Dark, Kornbluth commends Adler for transforming “eccentricities into assets” and for finding “a voice that is right for these times.”

Library Journal. CVIII, December 15, 1983, p. 2342.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. December 18, 1983, p. 1.

Maclean’s. XCVII, January 16, 1984, p. 48.

Nation. CCXXXVIII, February 18, 1984, p. 199.

New Leader. LXVII, January 23, 1984, p. 17.

New York. XVII, January 9, 1984, p. 55.

Playboy. XXXI, March, 1984, p. 32.

Prescott, Peter S. “Age of Angst and Anxiety.” Newsweek 102 (December 19, 1983): 82. Considers Pitch Dark “anorexic” and inferior to Speedboat; calls its repetitions annoying and its fragmented structure ineffective.

Shattuck, Roger. “Quanta.” New York Review of Books 31 (March 15, 1984): 3. Shattuck finds Pitch Dark less novelistic than autobiographical or confessional. This “inwardly impassioned work” shows little interest in outward events yet offers nevertheless a sense of its times through Adler’s two “astutely shuffled” narratives.