Word: fain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...narrative of Speedboat jumps around both in time and space as Jennifer Fain, a journalist, relates a series of stories about her past, her friends, her assignments, things she has read or seen. The vignettes, few more than a paragraph long, are juxtaposed with apparent disregard for the way we supposedly perceive reality. However, the jaggedness of the narrative is happily suited to the subject matter of Speedboat, life with "the jet, the telephone, the boat, the train, the television. Dislocations." The reader learns about the characters and events of the book the way Jennifer learns about them: through...
...claims she doesn't believe in evolution. "It seems to me that there are given things, all strewn and simultaneous." That is an excellent description of the way her novel works. All the information is there, but there is no way to piece the fragments together. Life, as Jennifer Fain sees it, resists the ordering processes we try to impose upon it. Because she cannot detect a pattern in experience, she contents herself with collecting examples of the perverseness of life...
Land Mine. The stories-or rather, the collage of perceptions-are told by a woman whose last name is Fain and whose first name may be Jennifer (one friend, at least, calls her Jen). Success seems to have fallen on her from a great height. She traipses obligingly but glumly through a succession of jobs usually thought to be desirable: newspaper reporter, foundation consultant, college teacher, congressional staff worker. She is clearly getting somewhere; where, exactly, and whether it is a place worth being are answers that elude her. "Things," she muses, "have changed very much, several times, since...
...Fain or no Fain, the author of that sentence is Renata Adler. Who else could hide a land mine under well-tended prose with quite as much apparent innocence? It takes a second or two to realize that intellectuals have been exempted from the frantic metamorphoses demanded by modern life. Why? The answer comes in bits and pieces: anyone who accepts (or demands) the label intellectual is automatically too dumb to deserve it. To prove the point, Adler puts her heroine through a year of teaching, "by mistake," at a Manhattan college, surrounded by "feather bedding illiterates" and "reactionary pedants...
Boston has twenty or so resident modern companies, some no more than a few students from so-and-so's class, others dedicated troupes led by strong choreographers. The most original tend to be Betty Fain (October 9-10), Deborah Chassler (December 3-5) and New England Dinosaur (watch for them next spring and in the me time check out avant-garde music events at the Dinosur Annex...