Renata Adler's Speedboat in its time and ours

Holding off on any judgment re Renata Adler's first (of 2) novels, Speedboat (1975?), as it's so unusual in every way that one night of reading isn't enough to help me understand her work (she has published many books of nonfiction, many articles in the NYer, where she worked for decades, and only 2 novels). Clearly, to the extent that it's a novel at all, it's a novel in fragments, in the "mosaic" style that some adopted and developed in the 70s in the era of postmodern fiction/the novel is dead/make it new. There is neither an arc to the narrative (or any narrative whatsoever) nor any significant development of characters, at least in the first 2 sections (about 1/4 through the book). Is it a novel at all? What RA has done is string together a sequence of vignettes, in no discernible order (possibly simply order of composition?) about various phases in the life of a character probably much like her though w/ some details changed (e.g., she references various international assignments for "the paper," when everyone knows she wrote for a magazine). The piece reminds me of the near-contemporary novel that I recently read, Eliz. Hardwick's Restless Nights, though EH's was more obviously a story of a life, her life, told out of sequence, in much more developed passages and scenes. What saves RA's work from being just the chaos of a spilled notebook is that every single one of the vignettes is striking and sharply observed, and the constant shifting of time and locale in fact gives the work a broader, more universal scope. There is not nearly the suffering and decline of characters that we saw in Hardwick; Adler's protagonist is more hard-boiled - she's not an ingenue learning about city life but a sly, tough observer ready to take on everything; some of the more powerful pieces involve hardships seen and endured in international reporting, heavy bouts of drinking (in college and after), injuries suffered by friends and strangers. Some are quite short and witty; none is sentimental. In a way they remind me also of Lydia Davis's short, quirky fiction - tho what Davis calls a story collection here is seemingly united into a single novel; if it were published and marketed today, it might well be presented as a collection of flash fiction: Each stands alone surprisingly well. RA deserves huge credit for pouring forth such rich materials, so many ideas - a writer's notebook poured forth into publication in the raw, but you also have to wonder: What if she'd taken one of these pieces, or several related pieces, and developed the material into a more conventional novel? In a way, Speedboat is very much of its time; the world is less open today to such formal experimentation as it was in the 70s - esp. from a well-established NY/NYer writer.

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