| Speedboat | |
| Author: | Renata Adler |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Publisher: | Random House |
| Release 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]