A Fleshless Comedy
DEEMER, CHARLES
A Fleshless Comedy Speedboat By Renata Adler Random House. 178 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Charles Deemer Novelist, short-story writer The narrator of Renata Adler's first novel is called Jen...
...Everyone else is merely dismissed: a "polo-playing Argentine existential psychiatrist," an "Indo-Chinese lesbian restaurant owner...
...There are only so many plots," she writes...
...many literary critics would counter...
...In other words, dealing with future shock, keeping sane in the city, making do...
...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Novelist, short-story writer The narrator of Renata Adler's first novel is called Jen Fain...
...Jen Fain is always at the center, though, and our response to her largely determines our response to the novel...
...Speedboat's audience, if it has one, is in New York City, not the rural South...
...Other eras, however, asked more from fiction...
...significantly, it took a good deal of searching to remind myself of this...
...Or is Speedboat symptomatic of another kind of sentence entirely, one imposed by a fashionable intellectual climate Is Jen Fain, with her witty coping, admirable Or rather, to quote from Norman O. Brown's Love's Body, is her "resisting madness the maddest way of being mad...
...But only so many plots...
...future eras may ask more again...
...Vignette piles upon vignette here, with all the random chaos that has made the 20th century a cliche be?fore its time...
...Down at the New Yorker, they love this book...
...we are asked to look elsewhere for our pleasure...
...Speedboat does not even have what many readers would still call a "story" (though things happen, things change...
...Indeed, laugh?ing "in our city lives, and our city jobs," is very much the focus here, a situation that may explain some of the reservations of a reviewer who lives in Maryland's Eastern shore approximation of the 19th century...
...What I find least attractive about Adler's narrator is her fleshlessness...
...For I suspect Adler feels the same way about a name as one of her characters does about a suntan: When you have one, what have you got In this cerebral book names, like all the other usual narrative devices- plot, character, dialogue-are too fashionably unfashionable to be bothered with, and one wonders why the narrator is christened at all...
...Personal and regional tastes aside...
...If you are amused, fine...
...if not, you may feel, as I did, that Jen Fain speaks for Renata Adler when she says, "It is no accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.' Speedboat is the perfect title for Adler's world, through which journalist Jen Fain rushes and reports, trying to cope, managing to laugh...
...There are insights, prose flights, rhythms, felicities...
...Such is the wit of Speedboat, with its bluejeaned young men and women who wear granny glasses over their contact lenses, its radicals in analysis, its nine-year-old who wears a "silver electric chair on her charm bracelet," its bartender who mixes a Last Mango in Paris...
...These, then, are the criteria Adler offers us to measure her work by: insights, prose flights, rhythms, felicities...
...Jen tells us we are all "fighting for our lives," yet Adler's narrative choices allow us to share that fight only from the most intellectual distance...
...At a slower pace, in a statelier world, the equations are statelier...
...And so we return to the chaos at the book's core, to the international-set anecdotes that structure it, and to the struggles of Jen Fain, who would fain laugh in the city as escape to the country...
...What is meant by sanity is suggested by the novel's ending: "It could be the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime...
...Well of course...
...We get inside her head as she takes her reporter's notes on the '70s, but we also find her becoming pregnant without ever getting a strong sense that she slept with anyone...
...Sanity, we are told, is "the most profound moral option of our time...
...Is this the sentence we need, and, in fact, always compose ourselves (as the major character in our own lives...
...I find something ultimately disturb?ing about Speedboat...
...What I admire about Jen Fain is that she (like Adler) realizes this: The crisis in contemporary fiction is one she embraces (albeit without making drama of the embracing, as does someone like Peter Handke...
Vol. 59 • December 1976 • No. 25
