Speedboat by Renata Adler

First published: 1976

Type of plot: Loosely structured ironic sketches

Time of work: Wanders between the narrator’s childhood years and the middle 1970’s

Locale: Primarily New York City, but touches many points on the globe

Principal Characters:

• Jen Fain, the narrator, a newspaper reporter and sometime columnist, college teacher, foundation consultant, and congressional staff worker
• Will,
• Sam,
• Aldo,
• Vlad,
• Joel, and
• Jim, an assortment of male apartment mates and confidants

The Novel

Speedboat is a conglomeration of ironic incidents presented to the reader by an equally ironic first-person narrator, a newspaper reporter named Jen Fain, who sometimes radiates an acute sensitivity and at other times seems hopelessly numbed. This “notebook” on the frenetic pace and crazy logic in everyday urban (and urbane) living also examines the landscapes of urban escape—the Hamptons, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean—where the pace slackens but the logic remains flawed, and doubles as self-directed psychoanalysis. The sketches, or vignettes, that comprise the novel most often feature Jen Fain, but some relegate her to the role of bystander and others have her curiously absent; she merely relays the incident.

Many narrative conventions are ignored. Time, for example, is not handled linearly, nor are there conventional flashbacks. The book bounces back and forth haphazardly with respect to time, as well as perspective. Fain may be watching a rat cross her path on a Manhattan street “last night,” and then, a page later, she may be speeding along a rural road in a car with no reference to time, then quoting the ironic remarks of people at a funeral where she plays no part, then appearing back in Manhattan on an unnamed day at 3:00 a.m., and then appearing in the present, telling the reader about her job. She returns to her childhood years, visits her college dormitory, and shoots into the near past with little regard for temporal continuity.

Speedboat is a peripatetic account of a peripatetic life, the narrator’s dualistic vision toward her role in the unfolding (and unfolded) events of an unsettling autobiography. On the one hand, Jen Fain introspectively examines the loss of what she calls her “sense of the whole”; her experience comes in ragtag pieces and she feels forced to “wait for events to take a form,” to fall into order, which they never do. Thus, she finds herself leading a number of partial lives, none of them ethically satisfying. On the other hand, she is a journalist, an objective recorder of pieces, whose job is to describe events, not analyze them, to distance the self, not immerse it.

Although primarily set in Manhattan during the mid-1970’s, the novel’s scope covers not only a large expanse of time, but also takes the reader on journalistic junkets around the globe—to Paris, Miami Beach, Zurich, Venice, Las Vegas, London, Martha’s Vineyard, Kuala Lumpur, Cairo, Biafra. Throughout her travels, Fain conducts an inner war, exhibiting the eye of both a camera and a humane witness, the ear of a tape recorder and an involved listener. She displays the ironic humor and pathos she finds in circumstances, in people’s words and actions, in her own words and actions—and comes up with anecdotal sketches which invariably house Speedboat’s glue: a system of sometimes jolting, sometimes deflating aphorisms that alternately kick off or conclude its pieces of narration.

The novel’s very first paragraph introduces the reader to one of these maxims—Fain’s opinion that “many of the most important things . . . are the ones learned in your sleep.” Sleep, she says, is a sustained medium through which one can capture the full “rhythm,” the meaning, of events. She goes on: “The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day.” Her dissatisfaction with the relentless unfolding of real events, so inherent in these words, is constantly tempered by Fain’s own recognized part in it all, a part she finds interesting enough that she needs to explore it, to tell the reader about it.

The narrator transports the reader, and herself, through a system of first-and third-person vignettes—high-level and low-level disturbances that upset the sense of rationality, of ethical order that she seeks. An eighteen-year-old girl, suntanning herself “with great seriousness,” concludes after two hours, “When you have a tan, what have you got?” On a ferryboat ride around Manhattan, a loudspeaker blares out baseball scores—with no accompanying context—to a mystified group of foreigners. Students at the University of California at Santa Cruz boycott their classes, and grapes, on the behalf of Santa Cruz’s locals. The locals despise the students and buy up all the grapes. Jen Fain can only comment: “There seemed to be no understanding among anybody.”

A man refuses to answer his telephone, “on principle,” deciding that if he wants to talk to someone, he will do the calling. He never considers that his “principle” might be shared. When an excitement-starved housewife from Malibu eagerly accepts a ride in a tycoon’s new speedboat (one reason for the book’s title), she exultantly bounces with the boat’s jumps—and breaks her back. Two barbers, Lewis and Florian, have worked side by side for years; while Lewis discourages conversation, Florian dances, sings, and imparts advice freely. The single piece of reaction that anyone has heard Lewis express about his “partner” is: “Someday I’m going to kill him.”

These bits of ironic exposition, and hundreds like them packaged into one or two or three paragraphs, make up Speedboat. They are linked together in a less amalgamated than accumulated cement that suggests hodgepodge but conveys a certain consistency because the pieces are all filtered through Jen Fain’s sensibility—even though she brings her sensibility into question. After all, she, unlike the people whose actions she observes, desperately needs sensible answers, normality: “Many things serve something other than their original, arguable purpose. The left lane, for example, on the highway. Some people use it because they prefer it. Some people use it because it looks like any other. Some people use it for some other reason. But the thing is, you are supposed to be driving faster if you use that lane.”

The book’s ending does provide a kind of resolution. Fain’s search for reasoning and wholeness seems fulfilled because she finds herself pregnant, the stuff of happy endings, new beginnings, and completeness—if only she did not think of the fetus as a “hostage.”

The Characters

Jen Fain is not a character the reader easily understands. Whereas she cares about the downtrodden, ill-equipped, city-scorned victims of inequity she bumps into on her daily agenda, she paradoxically does little or nothing to remedy their plight. An example comes to mind from the novel’s third “chapter,” in which Fain goes down to the first floor vestibule of her apartment building to retrieve her morning paper. A bum is asleep under the mailboxes, between the unlocked outer door and the locked inner door. She says, “I could have stepped over the sleeping man, picked up my Times, and gone upstairs to read it. Instead, I knocked absurdly from inside the door, and said, Wake up. You’ll have to leave now.’”

In another example, Fain finds a girl in the hallway of a friend’s apartment building looking “much too fast asleep” and not “entirely alive.” The narrator cannot find the callousness to leave the girl’s side, but she will not take any action, either; she just stares concernedly. The thought comes to Fain to check the girl’s purse or call an ambulance, but her friend says, “Maybe she wouldn’t want an ambulance.” Fain does not check her purse for identification, deciding that, should she become involved, the police might think she had some tie to the girl.

“My own mind is a tenement,” Jen Fain says. “Some elevators work. There are orange peels and muggings in the halls. Squatters and double locks on some floors, a few flowered window boxes, half-dressed bachelors cooling on the outside fire steps; plaster falls.” She views herself as inconsequential: She does not possess the power to affect events. Although she is intellectually capable (she admits that), she mistrusts her viscera; part of that mistrust can be blamed on her coldly voyeuristic occupation, part on her tendency toward bewilderment.

Fain’s perplexed demeanor and intellectual urbanity also contribute to her inability to perform the functions of a “normal” person. Because she spends so much of her energy thinking and rethinking circumstances, she simply cannot get things done. She has been taking flying lessons for years, the reasoning lost in time, and still dreads the thought of landing. She bought a rifle, unassembled, for protection, but unable to put it together. She thinks of the assembly as “one of those simple operations of life that seem to complicate themselves altogether out of my range.”

Jen Fain comes across as someone adept at words and the thoughts that produce words (she is, after all, a writer), but inept about actions and the thoughts that produce actions. Because she sees so much confusion in daily living, she seems admirably facile and courageous amid the hostile complexities of some of the book’s more exotic situations. She is equally at home walking down a muddy path in the Biafran darkness, with bullets whistling around her, walking back from a film on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Fain is the only real “main” character. Male characters—Will, Sam, Aldo, Vlad, Joel, and Jim—appear and disappear, showing that this peripatetic woman treats her men no differently from other people she encounters. They are Fain’s at-the-time companions who open up her experience a little more. As vehicles, they allow her to bounce off their untroubled personalities, offering “grist” for her internal exposé.

Critical Context

Speedboat, Renata Adler’s first novel, earned for her the Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel of the year. Adler has been a much-praised nonfiction writer, serving as a New Yorker staff writer up until and through the publishing of Speedboat.

What makes the novel stand out is its superb attention to detail and its disciplined approach to portraying an unraveling mind. The humility of the book’s narrator makes a reader enjoy Jen Fain enough so that any bafflement with structure or confusion about point of view becomes secondary and is defused. The warmth of the narrator’s “desired” heart overcomes her frustrating inability to act, to take charge of herself, and rid herself of distance. Adler works the same avenues of character that many readers have found so amusing and likable in Donald Barthelme. What sets her apart is the sincerity and longing she brings to Jen Fain.

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 the introduction provide valuable background for reading Speedboat in relation to Adler’s politics, generation, and experiences as a reporter.

Epstein, Joseph. “The Sunshine Girls.” Commentary 77 (June, 1984): 62-67. In this review of Adler’s Pitch Dark and Joan Didion’s Democracy (1984), Epstein surveys the two writers’ careers, criticizing both for their fragmented narratives and pessimism.

Hardwick, Elizabeth. “Sense of the Present.” New York Review of Books, November 25, 1976, 3-4, 6. Hardwick argues that Speedboat combines reportage, autobiography, and “deadly satire.” The narrator’s detachment and “disembodiment” is so severe and her alienation so predictable as to weaken “her authority as a witness.”

Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940-1980: A Comprehensive and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Karl discusses Speedboat in his chapter on minimalist writers (Donald Barthelme, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jerzy Kosinski, Susan Sontag et al.) but not in his chapter “The Female Experience.”

Kornbluth, Jesse. “The Quirky Brilliance of Renata Adler.” New York 16 (December 12, 1983): 34-40. Although occasioned by the publication of Pitch Dark, Kornbluth’s profile offers valuable insights into Adler’s life, about whom very little is known outside New York’s cultural circle.

Saltzman, Arthur M. The Novel in the Balance. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Although he faults the novel for coming down “to a series of elliptical allegories of authorial fecklessness,” Saltzman praises Speedboat for the way it balances “maximalist evidentiary procedures and minimalist concentration.”

Todd, Richard. Review of Speedboat. Atlantic Monthly 238 (October, 1976): 112-114. Argues that the atmosphere of Speedboat is existential but that its sensibility is not—is, in fact, free from stock response of any kind. Adler “is a spare, self-possessed writer who can do more in an aphoristic aside than many writers can do with a chapter.”

Towers, Robert. Review of Speedboat. The New York Times Book Review, September 26, 1976, 6-7. Towers finds the absence of plot a problem, but he claims that the novel is redeemed by the narrator’s reports of and reflections on the contemporary phenomena immediately around her. Unlike the French New Novels, Speedboat “is neither boring nor dehumanized.”