 First edition | |
| Author | Renata Adler |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1976 |
| Publication place | United States |
| 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.
Publication history[edit]
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]
References[edit]
- ^ Cunningham, Guy. "An Interview with Renata Adler", Bookslut.com Apr. 2013.
- ^ a b Bollen, Christopher. "Renata Adler", Interview 14 Aug. 2014.
- ^ "Renata Adler Wins Prize", The New York Times 27 Apr. 1977.
- ^ "1976 – National Book Critics Circle". www.bookcritics.org. Retrieved April 27, 2021.
- ^ Wallace, David Foster. "David Foster Wallace's amazing fiction syllabus", Salon.com 4 Nov. 2014.
- ^ Harvey, Melinda. "Is this a novel?", Sydney Review of Books 9 May 2014.
- ^ Robbins, Michael. "Speedboat by Renata Adler still flat-out races", Chicago Tribunes 15 Mar. 2013.
- ^ Wiener, Anna. "Millennials, Meet Renata Adler", The New Republic 14 Apr. 2015.
- ^ "Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion Person", Dork 9 Feb. 2018.
- ^ Felsenthal, Julia. "Goodbye, Vitamin May Be the Best Novel You'll Read This Summer", Vogue 10 Jul. 2017.
- ^ Derbyshire, Jonathan. "Weather by Jenny Offill", Financial Times 7 Feb. 2020.
- ^ Higgs, Christopher. "Heroine Worship: Talking with Kate Zambreno", The Paris Review Daily 22 Oct. 2012.
- ^ Alexander, Ella (6 Jan 2015). "Joan Didion's ultimate reading list: the books that changed her life". The Marginalian. Retrieved 5 March 2024.
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