Don’t Call It a Comeback: Renata Adler, Back in Print -The Toast

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Renata Adler’s Speedboat (Amazon | NYRB Classics) chronicles the misadventures of a student at a woman’s college who (illegally) owns an alligator, the Celtic knot of French wait-in-this-line-to-wait-in-this-line bureaucracy, a speedboat journey that leads to a broken back, and the inability of bougie under-40s to contribute meaningfully to charitable work. I could just as easily say that Speedboat examines the artifice of the campaign trail, the circle-jerk of academia, and the odd line that dictates male upstarts be deemed revolutionaries (while their female counterparts almost uniformly commit suicide). I could say all these things about Speedboat, because they’re all true. But I could not possibly tell you what this book is about, because it isn’t really about anything, and that is a very, very good thing.

Speedboat, reissued this year by the New York Review Books Classics, but originally published to acclaim in the 70s, is a litany of disconnected thoughts delivered in deadpan fashion by Jen Fain, a woman journalist and college instructor slash campaign aide. Jen’s work is important, because it dictates much of the content of the book, and it explains her sharp, and at times ruthless, dry deconstruction of everything around her — from her friends (“Situps aside, it is possible that we are really a group of invalids, hypochondriacs, and misfits”) to her teaching job (“Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours By Appointment; that is, never”) to the city of New York, in general (“‘I can’t believe it,’ people said, almost with passion. It was that year’s version of hello”).

But Jen’s profession also matters because it was the same as Adler’s. Though Adler’s fiction disappeared after the publication of Speedboat, and its successor, Pitch Dark (Amazon | NYRB Classics), her work as a journalist and nonfiction writer did not. Adler was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1963 to 1993, and a steadily published author of nonfiction books during that time. Though she’s been billed recently as a “forgotten writer,” it’s only her fiction that was forgotten, if anything, not her prose.

And it would be impossible to forget Adler’s prose. Speedboat is one of the only works of fiction I’ve read recently that has the economy of poetry, a deceptive slightness, as if Adler had started with a conventional novel and then cut the unnecessary pieces away from it until all that was left was the bones, the only part you really care about anyway. It’s a process to which that cheesy Michelangelo quote about cutting away everything that was not David seems to actually apply. Jen delivers disconnected yet convincingly solid accounts of the everything and nothing in her life, the sacred and profane, the weird and aggressively ordinary, the inside-baseball look into politics and journalism, and the economy of Adler’s prose plays into this. A journalist’s life often is episodic, impossibly busy, and cyclical. In this sense, a frenetic, fragmented novel of impressions from a writer who understands the inner workings (and misfirings) of politics and journalism seems more relevant than ever.

NYRB’s reissue comes with an afterword by Guy Trebay that is the literary equivalent of Laura Linney’s Masterpiece Theatre intro on PBS. In it, Trebay quotes another fan of Adler — David Shields, who praises Speedboat for its collage-like structure. But Trebay disagrees, arguing that Speedboat, “for all its apparent randomness, its Pik-Up-Stiks quality, is deeply patterned, less a collage of scraps than something closer to a musical mashup.” Trebay then goes on to compare Adler’s approach to that of a DJ, juxtaposing different songs, as if collage and mashups are not both basically about juxtaposition.

Trebay’s rejection of one comparison for another that works in the same way reduces Adler’s style to fight over semantics.  It’s an attempt to paint Speedboat as a careful, measured work, a privileging of a certain literary tradition and an attempt to place Adler within it. But Trebay does not use textual evidence to explain the underlying pattern he mentions. In fact, in all of the discussions of Adler I’ve read, no one has. And this raises a question that for me, makes Speedboat even more exciting. What if the discontinuity isn’t artful? And what if that’s the point? Speedboat isn’t great because it meets the requirements for being a great American novel. It’s great because it doesn’t.

There’s something uncomfortable about Renata Adler’s delayed canonization, and Trebay’s attempt to comfortably categorize her work is part of this. But I’m more concerned by the dubious claim of rediscovery, when it doesn’t seem to apply here, when the writer in question isn’t a disciple of the Salinger-Pyncheon school of disappearing.

In 2011, New Directions reissued Clarice Lispector’s novels with new translations and slick cover designs. Like Adler, Lispector’s resurgence was a fresh canonization of long out-of-print work, except that the idea of rediscovery makes possibly even less sense with Clarice Lispector than it does with Renata Adler. While Adler steadily published while her fiction went out of print, there is practically a cult of Clarice Lispector in Brazil.

Still, there is something unapologetic about both of them, about their prose, and about their lives. Rachel Kushner at Bookforum embeds hints at Lispector’s temperament into a broader discussion of her novels:

When she was living in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in the 1950s, playing, or simply being, a housewife, Lispector’s own contribution to the American Christmas tradition of holiday decorations was to cover a pine tree on her front lawn with dangling irregular forms in black, gray, and brown. “For me,” she said, “that’s what Christmas is.”

Like Adler, Lispector had also worked as a journalist during her life. Like Adler, Lispector writes with a poetic economy that completely explodes any ridiculous notion that spare, compressed prose is a masculine pursuit, and she’s just weird, too. The Passion According to G.H. is a novel entirely structured around a woman staring at a dead cockroach.

As other critics have pointed out, the name Jen Fain (Generic First Name + Synonym for False) suggests two things: 1) we have an unreliable narrator on our hands, and 2) she’s a stand-in for Adler. In Speedboat, Jen Fain’s voice reads as young, cold, and incisive, and she is almost certainly not going to tell you more than she cares to. In other words, she’s complex. As a reader, I loved her. Trebay calls her “a feckless young journalist seemingly incapable of forming anything like a real romantic attachment.” And while it’s possible that that’s true — several love interests are mentioned, few more than once — I read Jen’s lack of commitment as in keeping with the chaotic environment around her, a reflection of the frenetic pace of a young journalist’s life, rather than a signifier of fecklessness or a phobia of commitment.

But if Jen is seen as feckless, Renata Adler also gained a reputation for being cantankerous. “I’ve been described as shrill,” Adler told The Guardian recently. “Isn’t that strange?”

Being labeled as shrill or a loose canon commitmentphobe for having more than one romantic relationship are criticisms rarely lodged at male writers. I can’t imagine this type of scrutiny being lobbed at someone like Hunter S. Thompson, another famously quarrelsome campaign trail writer from the 70s, whose sloppy-brilliant accounts of drug-fueled encounters with campaign toadies seem in no peril of being deemed “deeply patterned” in the interest of meeting some imagined legitimacy of form.

In the 2012 VIDA count of women in publishing, only slightly over a quarter of the bylines in the New Yorker belonged to women, a reflection of publishing’s larger gender equality problem. Speedboat is a book that should be required reading for anyone who cares about good prose. I’m glad it’s back in print. But I sometimes wonder if these overly-fawning reissues of allegedly forgotten female writers are not a solution to the problem of gender inequality in publishing, but a symptom of it. Renata Adler is 74. Clarice Lispector is dead. Is there something more palatable about a cantankerous old woman than a “feckless young journalist”? And if we’re just discovering them now, who else have we missed?

Megan Burbank is a writer living in Seattle. She is the author of Notes on Lee Miller (Dancing Girl Press, 2013), and has written for Bitch, The Stranger, Two Serious Ladies, PANK, and other places. She runs communications for a reproductive rights advocacy nonprofit.

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