Adler's Speedboat as a novel about the NYC zeitgeist ca 1976

Am getting my bearings on Renata Adler's unusual "novel" Speedboat (1976), and I put the word novel in quotes because I'm not sure that this reads as a novel by any traditional standard - but it definitely read as a terrific collection of very short pieces; as noted yesterday, these are similar in some ways to Lydia Davis short stories, which of course in a collection of stories bear various inter-rations among characters, milieu, and ideas. This book, however we choose to classify it (in its day, the 1970s, definitions of literary genres were expanding as formal experimentation was more in vogue than it is now), is a work about the zeitgeist, an attempt to capture the mood of a time and place: New York City in the mid-70s. Each of the vignettes, grouped into chapters presumably w/ each a separate publication of a year's worth of fiction writing in her home-base magazine, the New Yorker, captures an aspect of the mood of the times as perceived by a prominent journalist whose social set includes academics and the NY intelligentsia, in other words, Adler herself. The protagonist such as she is (is she even named?) has ongoing relationships w/ one or two men over the course of the narrataive, but no character or plot emerges - that's not the point.  The book is more a mosaic or a collage - again, very in vogue at that time - and what makes it work is the precision of Adler's perceptions and the edge of her wit. The picture gradually fills over the course of (the first half of) the book: we see a NYC that is crime-filled and dangerous, with several of the vignettes about the murder of a landlord and the reaction of various tenants in his building (in a real NY touch, the tenants are ID'd by the music they played, music that reverberates in the hallways; one guy ID'd only as the "girl of constant sorrows" player). There are hilarious send-ups of academic jargon and political maneuvering (regarding for ex. which department should have exclusive rights to teach which authors) and of advertising lingo. There also are a # of vignettes about the men's social clubs, the women's charities, the casual racism expressed by the gentry - but what we also sense is that the wealthy and the intellectuals in NY are endangered - the city itself seems to be on the verge of collapse, with crime and violence everywhere. It's a long way from the current world of NY with the enormous gaps between super-rich and the working class (and even the average rich): in this book all seem teetering on the edge of poverty. We don't sense that there's a large population of financial whizzes on the rise or couples of singles in extremely expensive apartments, dining out every night. Rather, everybody of wealth or promise seems to want to get out - part of the metaphor of the title (as well as of a vignette in which the protagonist takes flying lessons - up and away). Oddly, however, for a book about a specific era and place, there are few references to contemporary events - Watergate and its aftermath, the oil shortage, hyperinflation, the bi-centennial. The NY elite seem to exist above politics, or so they believe.

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