Book Review: Speedboat by Renata Adler
Has standard storytelling gotten you down? Are you tired of have a linear plot, a “shocking” twist, a climax, and an easy resolution? Did you really want to enjoy Infinite Jest but struggled with the sheer size of it? Do you love experimental literature from 1976?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, I have got the book for you.
Speedboat by Renata Adler is as far away from formulaic as you can get without landing in someone’s stream of consciousness. It’s a book made up of a couple hundred blatant non sequiturs, strung together in a way that seems haphazard and lazy. But something in the back of your mind feels like there’s a pattern, it feels like there’s some method to this madness. And there is. My god, there is.
The book follows one Miss Jen Fain, a sometime journalist relating her pithy observations on the world around her as though we are picking up scraps of paper torn out of her journal. We are at once privy to her inner monologue and also looking through a keyhole at a broader scene we can’t quite get the edges of.
A chapter may jaunt from describing a hallway to a taxi ride to an old boyfriend to a trip she took to an apple orchard. We might learn about disgraced professors who gain notoriety to vagrants who harass her flatmates to men you’re not quite sure if she’s sleeping with or reviles. I think I fell in and out of love with her a dozen times through the reading.
At a brisk 170 pages, it’s a book for when you’re wide awake enough to pay attention but not for too long, it’s over soon enough. I’m compelled to write this review simply because Adler has invigorated me with her down-to-earth out-of-this-worldness. What, at first blush, appears the rantings of a madwoman are in fact brilliance carefully slotted into a incoherent novel that suddenly jars itself into coherence. Does that make sense?
If you’re in a frisky literary mood and interesting in what would happen if the phrase “see the forest for the trees” was turned into a book, read it.
If I had to rate it
I probably gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads. I’m too lazy to check.
