 First edition | |
| Author | Renata Adler |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1976 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 178 pp |
| ISBN | 0-394-48876-8 |
Speedboat is a 1976 modernist novel by Renata Adler that offers a fragmentary account of the experiences of Jen Fain, a young journalist living in New York City.
Prior to Speedboat, Adler was largely known for her nonfiction reportage in The New Yorker , and while Speedboat is billed as a novel it includes actual incidents and autobiographical elements; as Adler once remarked, "Some of it was real." [1] When the book was published in 1976, the 39-year-old Adler had temporarily left writing to become a first-year student at Yale Law School. "I guess I didn’t know what was going to happen when Speedboat came out", she later said. "I thought, I better be in law school, because who knows whether anyone will like it or not." [2] Speedboat received critical acclaim and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best debut work by an American writer of fiction. The prize was judged by E. L. Doctorow, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag. [3] The novel was also a finalist for the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award. [4]
The novel fell out of print in 1988 but remained a cult favorite; while teaching at Pomona College, David Foster Wallace included Speedboat on the syllabus for a course on "obscure/eclectic fictions", and in 2000 David Shields declared it "one of the most original and formally exciting American novels published in the past 25 years." [5] [6]
In 2013, Speedboat was reissued by New York Review Books simultaneously with Adler's second novel, Pitch Dark ; both works enjoyed a renewed wave of attention. [2] The Chicago Tribune referred to Speedboat as a "perfect novel", and Anna Wiener wrote in The New Republic that, "Out of the blue, it seemed like everyone I knew was reading and discussing Adler....New York City booksellers pushed [Speedboat] as a recovered sacred text [and] Adler earned a new coterie of readers." [7] [8] Writers Ezra Furman, [9] Rachel Khong, [10] Jenny Offill, [11] and Kate Zambreno [12] have subsequently cited Speedboat as an influence. In 2015, Joan Didion, to whom Adler has sometimes been compared, included Speedboat in her list of all-time favorite books. [13]
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
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Jenny Offill is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review.
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Renata Adler is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker for over thirty years and the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1968 to 1969. She has also published several fiction and non-fiction books, and has been awarded the O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.
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David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories. In addition to writing, Wallace was employed as a professor at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and Pomona College in Claremont, California.
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A fragmentary novel is a novel made of fragments, vignettes, segments, documents or chapters that can be read in isolation and/or as part of the greater whole of the book. These novels typically lack a traditional plot or set of characters and often are the product of a cultural crisis. The oldest fragmentary novels are part of the (proto)-picaresque novel tradition. Some of these fragmented novels are also categorized as short story collections or epistolary novels. Some fragmentary novels are (posthumously) published unfinished novels or are partially lost novels.
Pitch Dark is a 1983 modernist novel by Renata Adler about a newspaper reporter's affair with a married man. Decades after falling out of print, Pitch Dark was reissued in 2013 by New York Review Books simultaneously with Adler's first novel, Speedboat; both works enjoyed a renewed wave of critical acclaim.
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Dept. of Speculation is a 2014 novel by American author Jenny Offill. The novel received positive reviews, and has been compared to Offill's later work, Weather.