Trying to classify Renata Adler's Speedboat

Call it what you will - novel, story collection, memoir, flash fiction, essays, pensees, apercus - Renata Adler's Speedboat (1976), which she called a novel, does what all good fiction and (and nonfiction) does: Gives us consciousness of the consciousness of another. Attempts to argue that Speedboat is coherent and well-designed and a mirror held up to the turbulent times of America in the 1970s (see the afterword to the NYRB reissue) seem like reasoning after the fact. Why not just accept that these pieces occur as the came to RA over a periods of about 6 years of writing, and the extent to which they cohere into an overall design is another way of saying that they're all about an original writer and the way she thinks. Among the things she thinks about: the personality and behavior of a "wallflower," prowlers, drinking, Wagnerian opera (a hilarious piece in which the narrator is made to suffer thru the 5-hour performance), flying, academic jargon, advertising jargon, college rituals in an all-women's college ca 1950, the list could go on - as noted yesterday, it's probably best to read these entries, all of them short, ranging from a paragraph to at most a page and a half, in random order, letting each stand alone in your mind for a while, rather than galloping on to the next entry (as I did, unfortunately). These pieces capture well a specific time and place as perceived by a woman of an exclusive set, a NY intellectual in a time when there were such people. If you take this as a memoir of sorts, it's not especially forthcoming on key autobiographical elements (family, love relationships, children ... ) and if you take it as reportage there's hardly a mention - and then only in passing - of key news and cultural events of its time (Watergate, hyperinflation, oil shortage) - rather, it's a personal and idiosyncratic attempt to capture a moment and to record the zigs and zags of consciousness, yes, much like a novel, but w/out recourse to the tools generally available to a novelist: plot, character, setting. According to the afterword in the NYRB edition, RA indicated that she loves reading traditional novels (there's no such indication in Speedboat, however), but felt she couldn't write w/in the broader convention, which could be because of the "fragmented" time in which she lived, a personal quirk, or actually a shortcoming - at times I wished she would have developed some of these "moments" into a more conventional short story, at the least. If the latter, Adler made a virtue out of her shortcoming - it's not a novel for everyone, and maybe not even a novel, but it's a unique and striking piece of work.

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