Speedboat - Renata Adler
ADLER, Renata. Speedboat. New York: Random House, 1976.
First edition, first printing. Author’s first novel. Much of the material in this book appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker.
178 pp. Hardback (ISBN: 0394488768). Very good in very good dust-jacket. Previous owner’s name to front endpaper. Dust-jacket with minor wear; a couple of nicks; and a faint stain to the verso of the top/bottom front corner – totally invisible from the front. Author’s portrait to rear panel by Richard Avedon.
An acclaimed modernist novel, Speedboat was the winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award for best debut work by an American writer of fiction. The novel’s heroine, Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s New York.
‘In his book Postproduction Culture, the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud argues for the idea of the deejay as the dominant cultural figure of our time, and with its deft cutting and splicing, abrupt tonal shifts, subtle repetitions, inherent impatience, urgent rhythm, and jagged dissonances, Speedboat deploys basic deejay strategies. Distrustful of long forms – suites, albums, Great Works – and unconvinced that they were an effective way of rendering the jitters of life in the late twentieth century, Adler conjured a novel whose angular brilliance is how deftly it sampled the sounds and rhythms of contemporary life.’ (Guy Trebay in his afterword to the 2013 NYRB reissue of Speedboat).
Renata Adler (b. 1938) is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker in 1963, and except for a year (1968–9) as the chief film critic for The New York Times, remained at The New Yorker for the next four decades.
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