Fifty Books Project 2023

Speedboat

by Renata Adler

By now, there have been many years of accepted assurances that the water’s fine – quite warm actually – once you get into it; many years insane passings on of such an assurance.  And here we all are.  All that is, except Barney, whose sailboat overturned two years ago last November. It is probably that he had been drinking.  When Jim and I took him to dinner the preceding August, he said he was bored with his job.

  

This is among the most curious books I have read in a long time.  It follows the life and times of Jen – for much of the time it feels as if it could be her diary.  It consists of seven chapters (at least some of which were originally published as stories). The chapters are close to identical in tone with very slight changes in what might pass for plot.  While a great deal happens in each one, there is nothing that feels like a conventional plot arc.  We don’t get a narrative about Jen so much as a collection of events and her reactions to them.  They tell us something about her time and place (late 1960s New York) and her observations about that time and place.  Jen comes across as a slightly depressed, sardonic and passive observer of those around her.  Her life seems to be happening to her and to us as we read.

Each event is told in crisp, sometimes descriptive prose that lasts for a paragraph or two – very few are longer than a page in length – followed by another chunk of similar length and detail discussing a new event that has little or no connection to the previous one.  For example, the first six paragraphs of the novel might be summarized this way:  a discussion of Jen’s social scene, sailing, rats in New York, an unnamed father’s birthday party, the funeral of a union leader, the peculiarities of motel beds.

Along the way the sentences themselves become seductive – not least because so many stand out without context.  Yet also because they express Jen’s consciousness which, for all its passivity, is full of sharp observations and satiric judgment.  While the novel is of its time – full of references to Hair, and Janis Joplin and the Vietnam War it has a certain “Mad Men” sensibility – its captures the vapid emptiness that always seems to be part of cultural trends and judgments – perhaps especially in New York.  It is a vapidness that fights against itself and the medium of the fight is language – we seem eternally sure that we can make life meaningful if we simply describe it well.

It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs and laughs and slides, and stops right on a dime.