It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboat charged t
hrough the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for
a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously no
vel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of ever
y man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension,
and it is the story of Jen Fein, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape
of contemporary urban America.
Her voice is cuttingly perceptive, darkly fun
ny, and always fiercely intelligent as she breaks narrative convention to send d
ispatches back from the world as she finds it.
