Word: speedboats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...target of $25 million. Before the movie is finished. Superman will have 1) soldered together the Golden Gate Bridge, which has been cut in half by an earthquake, 2) rescued the President's airplane from a thunderstorm, 3) tamed the waters from a collapsing dam, 4) plucked a speedboat full of criminals from the East River and set it down, still dripping, on Wall Street, 5) caught a crashing helicopter in midair, 6) flown round the world in 90 seconds with Lois Lane in his arms, and 7) cooked a soufflé for Lois with his X-ray eyes...
...SPEEDBOAT by Renata Adler. This sequence of polished vignettes ticks off a range of contemporary neuroses, especially those plaguing people in their 30s-the generation that was too young to cheer the System and too old to blow...
Sometimes Speedboat reads like a believe-it-or-not collection. In addition to the flying suicide, there is the man who lulls himself to sleep by counting, not sheep, but all the people against whom he has grievances. When the imagined assembly is complete, he rounds them up and shoots them all with a machine gun. There is the woman from public broadcasting who calls Jennifer to ask whether she'd like to participate in a seminar on the female orgasm in literature. There is the airplane cargo door that opens in mid-flight, releasing, out of all the cargo...
...matter-of-fact presentation in Speedboat 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...
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...