Word: adler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...RENATA ADLER'S SPEEDBOAT is less a novel in the conventional sense than a series of journalistic sketches of contemporary life. The anecdotes and scraps of dialogue that make up the book are loosely linked by the device of a first-person narrator, but the storyteller offers so little commentary on her material that we develop only a vague awareness of her personality. The narrator's carefully maintained neutrality works largely to good effect in Speedboat. It saves the book from let-me-tell-you-what-it's-all-about pretentiousness. Adler presents a catalogue of images and events...
...enhances the humor and incongruity of these episodes. It also heightens our sense of grotesqueness. Nothing turns out as expected, a fact that may make us laugh, but the sort of laugh that trails off into a faint feeling of seasickness. For all its humor, Speedboat is ultimately saddening. Adler evokes a feeling of frustration with a reality that appears only as a series of bright but impenetrable surfaces...
...unmanageability of experience is not the only problem Adler confronts. Just as technology burdens us with an unprecedented amount of strange information to assimilate, the language needed to describe and thus understand it is being tampered with and degraded. The professions that rely most heavily on language--journalism, academe, politics--are the ones, Jennifer implies, responsible for the worst assaults against its linguistic integrity...
Fortunately, Speedboat is not a casualty of the war on language. Adler's prose is lean, straight-forward and exact. The compactness and order of her language provides an interesting contrast to the structural choppiness of the book. Adler's control of her structure is also consistently good; in rendering the incoherence of experience, she never lets herself lapse into unintelligibility under the assumption the reader wouldn't notice. The contrast between her narrative control and the defiant irrationality of the life she describes effectively heightens the sensation of vertigo that Speedboat is intended to inspire...
Such semantic fastidiousness is more common in philosophy than in fiction, and Adler's stories are more successful as illustrated lectures than as riveting narrative. It should be added that Adler is almost always a riveting lecturer. Like the legendary basilisk, she can look at a subject and turn it to stone. Speedboat is a cascade of smooth and shiny pebbles...