I do not have the attention span to sustain a lengthy depression, but I have of late been reading two novelists who do: Renata Adler and Joan Didion. I think of them as the Sunshine Girls, largely because in their work the sun is never shining…. They seem, these two writers, not really happy unless they are sad. They keep, to alter the line from an old song, a frown on their page for the whole modern age. (p. 62)
Of the two, Renata Adler is the less practiced novelist. She has written, in fact, two novels but no narratives. Speedboat, her first novel, and Pitch Dark, her second, are both composed for the most part of short, journal-like entries, which, in the modernist spirit, a reader has rather to assemble on his own. Speedboat, published in 1976, was much praised; it won the Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel of the year in which it was published. Reading it today, one notices certain affinities with the work of Ann Beattie: a flatness of expression meant to convey a deep spiritual fatigue. On the formal level, the novel seems Barthelmystically influenced, though without Barthelme's intellectual playfulness. (p. 63)
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Adler, Renata 1938–: Critical Essay by Joseph Epstein Access Pass.
