Speedboat (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Renata Adler
- First Published: 1976
- Type of Plot: Loosely structured ironic sketches
- Time of Work: Wanders between the narrator’s childhood years and the middle 1970’s
- Setting: Primarily New York City, but touches many points on the globe
- Principal Characters: Jen Fain, Will, Sam, Aldo, Vlad, Joel, Jim
- Genres: Long fiction, Antistory
- Subjects: Values, 1970’s, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Journalism or journalists, Traveling or travelers, Politics, Sex or sexuality, New York City, Alienation, Social life, Pregnancy, City life, Popular culture, Reporting or reporters
- Locales: New York, NY
The Novel
Speedboat is a conglomeration of ironic incidents presented to the reader by an equally ironic first-person narrator, a newspaper reporter named Jen Fain, who sometimes radiates an acute sensitivity and at other times seems hopelessly numbed. This “notebook” on the frenetic pace and crazy logic in everyday urban (and urbane) living also examines the landscapes of urban escape—the Hamptons, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean—where the pace slackens but the logic remains flawed, and doubles as self-directed psychoanalysis. The sketches, or vignettes, that...
[The entire page is 2463 words long]
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