Don't read Renata Adler's Speedboat as if it's a novel

I've come to think that I'm reading Renata Adler's "novel" Speedboat (1976) in the wrong way; it's probably not best read straight through cover to cover but better perhaps to think of her many short entries as independent works, each a short story verging on the being a zen koan, stories that one can read and experience in any sequence. There are a few connecting threads - the central character is a journalist in NYC much like Adler (her name, as the jacket copy reminded me, is Jen Fain - but there are very few references to her by name). She's single with an on-again, off-again relationship w/ a well-heeled man, Aldo, who does a lot of traveling, and there's another guy in her life named Jim. We know little about either man. We do see that she travels internationally on assignment, vacations on various Mediterranean islands that are out of the way and underdeveloped (at least int he 60s/70s - not today for sure!), takes up various interests (e.g., flying lessons), attends lots of literary/intellectual gatherings, does some adjunct teaching (at CUNY?), drinks a lot. All this is beside the point. The elements arrange themselves in your mind as you read and the picture of her life becomes a little more clear toward the end - but what really sticks are the wry observations and the sense of time and place, New York in a time when the city teetered on the verge of chaos, when it was still possible to have an urban intellectual class, and when the gap between social classes was not immeasurable, as it is today. For an experiment, read the first (or the last) entry in each of the chapters to get a sense of Adler's "inwit" - or read randomly through the book as if it's a poetry collection. That will work. She does not seem to have an overall design in mind - I cannot believe that when she wrote the first of her short pieces she knew where or how this project would conclude. Don't approach it with the expectations that you usually bring to fiction (to novels). Which pieces are your favorite? Which made you laugh? Which stay w/ you? (For me: the flying lesson, the satire of academic politics, the observations on the language of literary criticism and reviews, the frightening scenes about the prowler at Jen Fain's apartment building in NYC). 



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