SPEEDBOAT - RENATA ADLER

The source of the sauce. The sauce fount. The origin story. There is so much current cool lit-hipster content (to use their term) that owes Adler a fucking check. I had no idea. I hadn’t even heard of her until recently, when I read something that suggested that she was having a renaissance amongst New York publishing types, since the publishing arm of the New York Review of Books reissued her shit. It’s always interesting when things are rediscovered and gain popularity decades after they’re published. Adler is still alive and doing great, something I’ll get into in a second, so this is not some Herman Millville thing. But it’s still interesting to consider. But here there is no mystery as to why she’s newly popular, the rest of us have caught up with her style. The short, seemingly unconnected paragraphs, the lack of a strong narrative drive, the emphasis on vibe or feel over story. Even the setting is unfixed. It takes place in a milieu of young and young-ish rich intellectual types. Journalists, college professors, magazine writers, all of whom travel around the world doing rich people stuff. But between these factors and the way Adler whips back and forth between banal and profound/startling “It’s not so bad...it only isn’t wonderful. Nobody has an obligation to be wonderful.” “Many sentences contained their own congratulations. Suffice to say...or, the only word for that is.” “The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way down a one way street.” It breezed by, it managed to be both slight and engaging. The afterwards has a long section where Adler’s style is compared to a variety of different activities. It’s flipping channels on the radio, it’s a DJ curating a masterful set, it’s like living in NY. In reality, Adler nails the experience of being online and switching tabs and apps and conversations while simultaneously thinking about a million things, personal and mundane to cosmic and spiritual. Her other book of fiction has been reissued. I’mma have to cop that as well. 74 short scenes.