Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

But there is a mystery, and it is a literary mystery, at the airport. Kate Ennis decides to change her name in order to make good her escape. She is convinced she is being watched, followed, so this is reasonable. Kate records: “Traveling under a false name might be a crime of some sort. I should make the name as like my own as possible to account for the mistake. Alder, I thought. But then that does happen so often. I was afraid they might make the same mistake and be on the lookout for just such an Alder. So I thought, Hadley, since no one would look under H. And then, in my new hilarity, I thought, Why not Haddock. But that seemed going too far.”

She settles on Hadley for a false name “as like my own as possible.” But her own name is Ennis, and Alder, Haddock, Hadley do not resemble Ennis, could not possibly pose as either a visual or aural mistake. If the “I” of the story, on the other hand, has suddenly changed from Miss Ennis to Miss Adler, the author herself, that would be understandable, but it is nowhere else in the book suggested that the identities of author and character have temporarily merged.

Does Miss Adler mean to suggest that she herself is Kate Ennis? Illogical characters are fine, but this has the effect of professional illogic. It breaks the fiction, and, for a brief moment, we have autobiography. One of the refrains that recurs throughout the book runs, “Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine.” The mystery of the false name remains. Whose voice?

The big question a work like this imposes on the reader is, What is a novel? There is no absolute definition, but certainly, to some extent, a novel is a representation of the author’s vision of life. Pitch Dark , like Miss Adler’s Speedboat , is a work of fiction mainly by virtue of the fact that it claims to be so; we take it for granted the “I” of the novel is a fictional character. In both books, the character is a journalist. And Miss Adler’s vision too is a journalistic one. In Speedboat the narrator claims: “I do not, certainly, believe in evolution. For example, fossils. I believe there are objects in nature — namely, fossils — which occur in layers, and which some half-rational fantasts insist derive from animals, the bottom ones more ancient than the top. The same, I think, with word derivations….I have never seen a word derive.”

This, I think, is the vision of life reflected in Miss Adler’s fiction. Nothing evolves, nothing derives. Effects do not result from causes. Episodes are recorded without any connection with each other. Fortunately, they are fascinating episodes.

— MURIEL SPARK

1983