Pitch Darkby Renata Adler
I enter a small town: and, as I round a curve, on the cobbled road, I hear and slightly fee a sort of crack, or smack, on my side of the car. I think I’ve grazed a truck, a very large truck, parked half on the sidewall, have in the road, along the curve.
This is Adler’s second and final novel, and it bears a strong resemblance to her first – Speedboat. Both are structured around short, elliptical passages of action, description, narration and dialogues and these snippets slowly build a larger narrative. In this case, it is the story of Kate Ennis. I would not know that name if it were not mentioned in the blurb on the back of the book, and while that little summary says the book is about her separation from her married lover of eight years, there is little told of that separation, though it is clearly established through a repeating refrain of phone calls in which the lover complains that she has left and the narrator denies it.
However, we know she has left because most of the narrative involves her travels and interactions with people who seem to be helping her (usually unknowingly) get over the loss of this relationship. The entire middle section of this short novel is given over to the story alluded to above. Kate goes for a vacation to Ireland and while driving to her friend’s mansion west of Dublin, gets into a fender bender with a parked truck. The accident is recalled several times invivid detail as is her subsequent negotiations over reporting to insurance companies between her, the truck owner and the local constable.
Kate is convinced she is being cheated and drives off, late abandoning her dented, rented car in a small town in the middle of the night. The rest of her stay in Ireland is one long paranoid episode of her trying to leave the country without alarming her guests or letting the police know that she is the criminal who left the scene of an accident and abandoned a rental car. The paranoia and level of obsession with her getting caught seems out of all proportion to the alleged crime and it is immediately clear that her fear of being followed and her indecision about where to go have more to do with her breakup than with what she refers to later, repeatedly, as “the Irish thing.”
Like Speedboat, the mastery of structure maintained my interest as the shifting perspective and timeframes kept up a tension that was not native to the story being told. Where Speedboat built to an emotional finish that made the very intellectual effort of putting the various incidents together pay off, Pitch Darkfails to ever build much emotional resonance. Her relationship with the married man has devolved into odd, inconsequential phone calls and Adler ends with her narrator explaining the relationship between court cases and narrative in dry, technical terms. While this reinforces the connection between “the Irish thing” and the breakup, it dampens any involvement the reader may have in that connection.
However, the book did supply me with two interesting quotes about writing that are worth thinking about:
You are very busy. I am very busy. …. So there is the pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say, but to justify its claim upon our time.
… the reality I inhabit is already slant.
These two seem to reinforce a kind of anti-writing quality about Adler’s writing – as if the novel cannot capture reality and may not, therefore be worth the effort. We hurtle along through the pitch dark on unknown roads and our later reflections on where we have been cannot live up to the reality of that run through the darkness.
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