Adler, Renata 1938–

American critic, short story writer, and novelist, Renata Adler is best known for her contributions to The New Yorker. Speedboat is her first novel. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)

"Speedboat" makes no concession to any craving—vulgar or sophisticated—for an engrossing narrative. Furthermore, though concerned fleetingly with motivations, "Speedboat" avoids the sustained psychological rendering of character as rigorously as the novels of Robbe-Grillet, but without attempting their quasi-musical purity as linguistic constructs. The book does have an emotional impact—a strong one—but one that derives more from a painfully exact transcription of the life many of us lead than from the creation of a powerfully imagined fictional world. From almost any approach one chooses to take, "Speedboat" is a non-novel.

Yet it is a very good book: elegantly written, often funny, vivid in its presentation...

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