Pitch Dark by Renata Adler

What's new? the biography of the opera star says she used to ask in every phone call, and What else?  I'm not sure the biographer understand another thing about the opera star, but I do believe that What's new.  What else.  They may be the first question of the story, of the morning, of consciousness.  What's new.  What else.  What next.  What's happened here, says the inspector, or the family man looking at the rubble of his house.  What's it to you, says the street tough or the bystander.  What's it worth to you, says the paid informer or the extortionist.  What is it now, says the executive or the husband, disturbed by the fifteenth knock at the door, or phone call, or sigh in the small hours of the night.  What does it mean, says the cryptographer.  What does it all mean, says the student or the philosopher on his barstool.  What do I care.  What's the use.  What's the matter.  What's the action.  What kind of fun is that.  Let me say that everyone's story in the end is the old whore's, or the Ancient Mariner's: I was not always as you see me now.  And the sentient man, the sentient person says in his heart, from time to time, What have I done.

I loved Renata Adler's Speedboat.  It seemed hardly like a novel; it was an effusion of anecdotes and impression that nevertheless told a story, because real stories--as they're lived--are like that.  They're not particularly linear, and they don't have the ancient unities of time and place.  Adler, a lifelong journalist, knew from observation the fitful and scattered nature of human life.

Pitch Dark, another of Adler's novels (the only other one?  I'm not sure) has much in common with Speedboat.  The frenetic pace and style is instantly recognizable; it cares no more about situating the reader in time, place, or narrative than that other novel.  Stories are told that seem to have little, perhaps nothing, to do with the main plot.  And it can, like Speedboat, be tremendously funny:

He mentioned the Ku Klux Klan.  He alluded to it several times, the Klan.  And each time, he referred to its membership, the members of the Klan, he called them.  Clamsmen.  No question about it, that's how he pronounced it.  Clamsmen.  It was no reflection on the Attorney General.  True, the judge's wife had never thought much of his diction.  True, in the court's most important decisions, he had been so often in dissent.  But the years had passed.  He had come to speak well and to do honor.  And this business of the Clamsmen, well, it may have had to do with molluscs, bivalves.  Even crustaceans.  I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing her roommates as prawns of imperialism.

But at its heart, Pitch Dark is much more troubling, and troubled.  It simultaneously boasts a more coherent main narrative and is more disorienting.  It tells the story of Kate Ennis, a journalist who has ended a long-term affair with a married man.  And if you figured that out, good on you, because Adler is stingy with context.  In fact, the man's only presence is in a repeated motif of short dialogues and recurrent statements that are devoid of any context at all.  Adler repeats them, obsessively, many pages before she gives them context or explanation: "The truth was, there was something in the ice cube.""Not here, Diana said, to her lasting regret, to her own daughter, who approached her crying, in front of all those people."  "Did I throw the most important thing, perhaps, by accident away?"

All this contributes to an image of a woman who is not well; who has unraveled along with her love affair.  If Speedboat rejoices in the fragmentary and ad hoc nature of the world, Pitch Dark is a frightening warning about the dissolution of the mind and the soul.  The main narrative, such as it is, sees Kate taking up residence in a friend's Irish castle, where she suspects the staff and is tortured by the possibility that a local cop is planning to extort her after a fender bender.  She abandons her rental car, leaving it in Ireland in the dead of night--but the abandonment, in this book, comes far before the fender bender.  Kate's paranoia, we are meant to understand, is not exactly the consequence of the fender bender.

Living in a cabin, Kate feeds a raccoon who visits her daily:

He left through his crawl space as soon as he saw me.  But because, on every subsequent evening, he stayed longer and left less abruptly; because he returned most nights, and slouched, on the stove, leaning against the stove pipe, all night, until morning; because he sometimes touched, though rarely, the water I left in a dish beside the stove for him; because he was, after all, a wild thing, growing ever more docile; we arrived at our misunderstanding.  I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying.  So are we all, of course.  But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.

Ultimately, that's what Pitch Dark is about: mistakes, and love, and abandonment, and whether one of the last two, or both, are the same as the first.  "Did I throw the most important thing, perhaps, by accident away?"  It's a challenge where Speedboat is a delight, and sparing in its rewards, but intentionally so.

Speedboat by Renata Adler

Summer.  The speedboat was serious.  The young tycoon was serious about it, as he was serious about his factories, his wife, his children, his parties, his work, his art collection, his resort.  The little group had just had lunch, at sea, aboard the tycoon's larger boat, a schooner.  The speedboat, designed for him the year before, had just arrived that day.  The tycoon asked who would like to join him for a spin to test it.  The young American wife from Malibu, who had been overexcited about everything since dawn, said she would adore to go.  Her husband, halfway through his coffee still, declined.  The young Italian couple, having a serious speedboat of their own, went to compare.  In starting off, the boat seemed like any other, only in every way--the flat, hard seats, the austere lines--more spare.  And then, at speed, the boat, at its own angle to the sea, began to hit each wave with flat, hard, jarring thuds, like the heel of a hand against a tabletop.  As it slammed along, the Italians sat, ever more low and loose, on their hard seats, while the American lady, in her eagerness, began to bounce with anticipation over every little wave.  The boat scudded hard; she exaggerated every happy bounce.  Until she broke her back.

Why is this anecdote so central to this book, more or less a collection of anecdotes, that it provides the title: Speedboat?  It is certainly typical of the book's style.  There are characters, only tangentially connected to the narrator, who appear only to tell this specific story.  It is brief, minimalist, and the twist of shocking and violent.  It's wry and ironical.  The miniature stories that make up Speedboat come quickly, with their own hard thuds.  Is that what life is, a series of anecdotes lived out at breakneck speed?

There is a narrative arc to Speedboat which takes us through the story of the narrator, a New York journalist named Jen Fain, as she passes through assignments, apartments, groups of friends, boyfriends.  But this narrative arc seems less important than the small, crystalline stories that gather around it, many of which have little or nothing to do with Jen herself.  You might say the book itself is journalistic, in function and in style.

I loved Speedboat.  I dog-eared almost every other page.  Some of the stories are just funny:

In a public school in a run-down section of Brooklyn, Mrs. Cavell, under a grant for special projects, was conducting her kindergarten civics class.  "What are you?" she would say to her little people, right after the bell each weekday morning.  "I'm free," they learned to say, as one.  On a particularly cold, bleak morning of midwinter, Mrs. Cavell tried a variation.  "Today, we are going to say it in our individual voices," she said.  "When I call on you , I want you to stand and say it proudly.  All right.  Jefferson Adams, what are you?"  Jefferson Adams got it.  "I'm free," he replied.  "Right.  What are you, Franklin Atell?"  "I'm free," Franklin Atell said.  Mary Lou Jones had to me asked to speak up, but then she said it frimly, "I'm free."  Up and down the rows of carved and gum-stuck desks in the pre-school classroom, the words rang out, but Mrs. Cavell, a good soul, who had taught for thirty years in Brooklyn, saw a look of somehow disquieting revolution on Billy Martin's face.  "What are you, Billy Martin?" Mrs. Cavell asked.  "I am four," he said.

Others seem powerfully true:

Last week, I went to a dinner party on Park Avenue.  After 1 a.m., something called the Alive or Dead Game was being played.  Someone would mention an old character from Tammany or Hollywood.  "Dead," "Dead," "Dead," everyone would guess.  "No, no.  Alive.  I saw him walking down the street just yesterday," or "Yes.  Dead.  I read a little obituary notice about him last year."  One of the little truths people can subtly enrage or reassure with is who--when you have looked away a month, a year--is still around.

I love this oblique meditation on what I understand as the moneyed class in NYC:

The camel, I had noticed, was passing, with great difficulty, through the eye of the needle.  The Apollo flight, the four-minute mile, Venus in Scorpio, human records on land and at sea-- these had been events of enormous importance.  But the camel, practicing in near obscurity for almost two thousand years, was passing through.  First the velvety nose, then rest.  Not many were aware.  But if hte lead camel and then perhaps the entire caravan could make it, the thread, the living thread of camels, would exist, could not be lost.  No one could lose the thread.  The prospects of the rich would be enhanced.  "Ortega tells us that the business of philosophy," the professor was telling his class of indifferent freshmen, "is to crack open metaphors which are dead."

Sometimes Adler tosses up a stark and affecting image:

Sometimes a stupid child would tie a firecracker to a crayfish or a frog just once, and light the fuse.  Or give a piece of sugar to a raccoon, which in its odd fastidiousness would wash that sugar in a brook till there was nothing left.

And I can't tell you how much I love this description of television commercials, the last sentence of which I am officially inducting into the Great Sentence Hall of Fame:

A lady lifted the lid of her toilet tank and found a small yachtsman, on the deck of his boat, in the bowl.  They spoke of detergents.  A man with fixed dentures bit into an apple.  A lady in crisis of choice phoned her friend from a market and settled for milk of magnesia.  A hideous family pledged itself to margarine.

Speedboat is one of those books where I find myself not having much to say, preferring just to show you my favorite bits and get out of its way.  These little stories never really cohere into anything, but they give a unified impression, true perhaps to the frenetic pace of life in the city--instantly recognizable to me, even forty years after the book's publication--and the dizzying speed of the passage of life.