Renata Adler - Speedboat

“In Speedboat , something odd kept happening,” Adler told me. “Once I had an anecdote, and my intention was to keep going until I reached the whole point, my reason for telling it, I noticed that well before I got to what had seemed to me the point, I stopped. In retrospect, I had this image, which may be an uneducated image, of biting off the thread. I mean, I think the Fates did that. The thread tightens and at a point in a life they bite it off. I was biting off the thread before the thing I was writing, the part of the story, the anecdote, was done.”

The threads held by the Fates, of course, were the puppet strings of mortal life. The Fates toyed with their protagonists, as novelists do, until they wearied of them and time came to cut the thread and pack them off to the well of souls.

“What is the point,” Jen says in Speedboat . The sentence is not a question. “That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind….Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.” Vigilant skepticism, a deep dubiety, is probably the strongest and certainly the most modern current of feeling in Speedboat : doubt, after all, is writing. The elegance, the enduring freshness of Speedboat is no mystery when you consider it a novel that not infrequently calls into question the moral of the story and, often enough, the story itself.

— GUY TREBAY