Speedboat (23 page)

“Are you shaky on ladders?” Jim said. It had crossed my mind just then. I had never been shaky on ladders in my life before. I looked down the three flights of ladders to the cement floor. I laughed. “Hell, no,” I said. “Not at all.” “It would be O.K.,” he said. “Fears are such a personal thing.” I would not have been scared, I think, if I had been wearing sneakers and jeans. But climbing around a construction site in high heels and all, I was beset by an extreme proposition of What if. What if I just cleave to the rungs and hover here, without looking down at the concrete. Nothing could be done. If Jim were to hold out his hand from the rungs above, it wouldn’t help; if I leaned back, the entire ladder would probably fall. The thing is to eradicate the What if, or at least postpone it, until it becomes an appropriate, theoretical speculation, on the stable ground.

The idea of hostages is very deep. Becoming pregnant is taking a hostage—as is running a pawnshop, being a bank, receiving a letter, taking a photograph, or listening to a confidence. Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing. Blackmail, kidnapping, then, are among the extreme violations of the deal. Anyway, I seem to be about to have Jim’s child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven’t mentioned it to Jim.

“Far from it.” There he is again. “Don’t dwell on it.”

In any group of two or more, it seems, somebody is on trial. Sometimes more than one person is on trial. Sometimes everyone is. But not for long. Under the law, a person can be said to plan alone or to plot alone, but not to conspire alone. There are other things, of course, no one can do alone: be a mob, or a choir, or a regiment. Or elope.

We had been heading for it all afternoon. Every time we all decide to do something out of doors, we begin the day with a sense of exuberant good health, followed by a slow intoxication of danger. Often it ends mildly. Somebody barefoot steps on broken glass, or one of the beer drinkers cuts himself on the tin. One year, somebody’s guest from Palo Alto actually inhaled a cinder of his marijuana. Other times, someone missteps serving at tennis, falls, turns gray. In every case, it winds up in the emergency room. When this happens, it is always past four in the afternoon. Whoever is hurt, if he is conscious, apologizes. The form is from school days. The boy who got carsick and made the school bus stop, the girl who had a tantrum and then high fevers on the way to the museum, always spoke of spoiling it for everyone. Counting the wounded at the end of an afternoon these days, as they still apologize for spoiling it for everybody, we often find that the wounded outnumber the one or two hale whom they seem to think they have spoiled it for.

When Dan rode his bicycle over a cliff, we all behaved in characteristic ways. We were in Central Park. There was intense competition for calm, for sane instructions. Cover him, take his pulse, call a doctor, get an ambulance, stand back, raise his head, don’t move him, leave him room and air. He had been riding his bicycle at full speed, with a kind of Western-yodel whoop, over the cliff edge. It had been a dare. He was out quite cold. In the rush to help, Jeff and Lee—who are the nicest of us, really—quietly returned all the bicycles, including Dan’s, with its bent frame and mangled wheel, to the store from which we had rented them for the day. Two uniformed men appeared. They told Dan to get up. He opened his eyes. “Lie still,” we said. “Wait for the ambulance.” One of the uniformed men said, “Hey, man, we
are
the ambulance.” Dan blinked. He tottered up a steep hill to their car. He sat on a stretcher. They let him sit up, occasionally bumping his head lightly against the roof, all the way to the hospital. He mumbled apologies. Ralph’s girl, in a helpless daze of solicitude, held Dan’s shoe in her lap. Situps aside, it is possible that we are really a group of invalids, hypochondriacs, and misfits. I don’t know. Even our people who stay fit with yoga seem to be, more than others, subject to the flu.

“Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language. “Good morning,” says the poet’s wife, quite sunny-natured. “Do you realize,” the poet replies, “how angry you sound?” The poet’s wife, confused, pacific, says she isn’t at all angry. He repeats his question. Three more disclaimers on her part; on his, three more apparently calm and deadpan repetitions, and she is in fact beside herself. We are all, from time to time, too—well, too vehement. But there doesn’t seem to be much anger in our set. Nor much of the happy faculty of saying, This is mine, and this is mine, and this too is mine, by right. When it is not. In the idiom of our class and generation, we said, Maybe we could lie down for a minute.

On a charter flight, I once met a middle-aged black man from Georgia, who had served in World War II, put himself through school, and then through college in the South. His oldest son had won a scholarship to Yale. At the end of his junior year, the son dropped out. He was going to travel across the country, play the guitar, and find himself. In less than twenty years, in short, and by an accident of historic time, that family had lived through the whole circle of the dream, in which the sons throw away what it has been the sole hope and effort of the grandfathers to amass and to consolidate. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation, in these times, perhaps. Or the boy might become a star and send all his own sons to Yale.

Jim has in his mind, I think, one erratically ringing alarm clock, one manacled dervish, one dormouse, replete with truisms, and one jurist with a clarity of such an order that I tend to love his verdict in most things. So, there is the question of this hostage, if that’s what it is, and there is the fact of my not having mentioned it to him. These days, Jim says, very often, “Well, I had to make a decision. In my judgment, it was the right one; I’ll stand by it.” Every politician seems to like to say that. I don’t care for it. Having somebody’s children is not, of course, the sort of thing that yields much to consultation. There it is. One simply does it. On the other hand, there seems to me no time, simply no time, even years from now, when such a decision is not subject to review. Leaving aside the more gothic possibilities, what if one’s son (or, and this seems unimaginable, daughter) simply, from the first and in every way, doesn’t turn out right, or is unhappy all his life, what then? I don’t know what then. “You can’t miss it” always means you’re never going to find it. The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way on a one way street. All the same, all the same, I think there’s something to be said for assuring the next that the water’s fine—quite warm, actually—once you get into it. You can’t miss it. It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.

“I WANTED
to write the kind of book I like to read,” Renata Adler said, “which is narrative, thrillers, with plots, suspense, and dialogue, with characters and things going on, things which you wish to happen and things you do not. I found I didn’t seem to be doing that. I thought, ‘Well, now what do I do?’”

Speedboat
was the solution.

By turns journalistic, diaristic, aphoristic, always episodic and mordant,
Speedboat
is a novel made up of a series of sharply observed miniatures rendered aslant. Although at times it can seem these miniatures are deployed, to paraphrase Borges, arbitrarily and in no special order, like the things one sees in dreams, they are in truth organized in subtle and inevitable patterns, also like things in dreams. Because
Speedboat
is a novel without obvious beginning or end, one in which narrative progress is measured less in terms of event than by incisively rendered detail, and where a mere fragment of dialogue may indicate that everything has changed, it has sometimes been lumped into that dreariest of categories: experimental fiction.

Better and truer to say that the novel has a unique power to produce what Donald Barthelme described admiringly as “glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life.” And if in
Speedboat
those glimpses captured the white light of flares signaling general cultural distress…well, consider that in 1976, the year
Speedboat
was published, the Irish Republican Army exploded bombs in the West End of London; the publishing heiress Patty Hearst, a k a Tanya, was sentenced to jail for her part in armed robberies undertaken by the improbable revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army; Steve Jobs founded a company that manufactured machines that would forever alter our relationship to the consumption of information (and everything else); and Jimmy Carter became the first candidate from the Deep South to gain the presidency since the Civil War.

The 1970s were the morning-after of the 1960s—its hangover. The confusions and discontents of that strange and in many ways benighted decade form the background against which
Speedboat
came into being. And they also provide some insight into the frequent claim that it is written in a voice of dread and with a signature “panic tone.”

For panic, though, why not read deadpan?
Speedboat
is, after all, a book in which the narrator, Jen Fain, a feckless young journalist seemingly incapable of forming anything like a real romantic attachment, or posing a direct question, or even picking up the newspaper in the morning without encountering a moral quandary in the form of a vagrant passed out in the vestibule, nevertheless draws a consistent bead on life’s quiddities.

The cast of her world—that is, New York City—and book is wildly assorted: a polo-playing Argentinean existential psychiatrist; a Scrabble-playing Begum; a journalist with sources so good inside the intelligence community that his distrustful employers banish him to a suburban edition. There are women with imaginary lovers. There are mangy and lovable and always misunderstood dogs. There are young girls who, short of both cash and intellectual confidence, cadge cab fare and cultural passions from friends. There are sauntering rats caught in peripheral vision; newspaper hacks; a linguistic pedant who thinks that to have named a thing correctly is “to cut its nails and hair, and pocket them, and put the adversary in his power.”

In the latter case the instinct is, Jen says, “entirely modern: to impress on everything that passed his way Joel’s word for it, his personal bureaucratic rubber stamp.”

Speedboat
does that also, stamping contemporary consciousness with its singular mark. Because the book prefigured by decades certain telegraphic forms of communication we now take for granted, it is easy to miss the point that
Speedboat
got there well before e-mails or Facebook or Twitter. Adler had grown up reading nineteenth-century novelists and they had shaped her; yet she found she was not able to work in traditional forms herself. And thus
Speedboat
is a book without suspense or anything like a distinct plot, a novel whose protagonist is one whose telephone conversations often sound like dialogue from Beckett, whose relationship to violence is abstract, whose ear is always bent to capture the antic and sadly comical cocktail-party blather of late twentieth-century urban life. It is a book in which time and tense are unstable, event is compressed, morality subject to constant revision, under pressure of situational torque.

“I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now,” the novelist David Shields, who heaped praise on
Speedboat
, once wrote. In
Reality Hunger
, Shields argued in favor of a fiction assembled from the scraps and shreds of existence, the stuff we find in our experiential pockets and the stuff that finds us. Yet
Speedboat
, for all its apparent randomness, its Pik-Up-Stiks quality, is deeply patterned, less a collage of scraps than something closer to a musical mashup.

In his book
Postproduction Culture
, the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud argues for the idea of the deejay as the dominant cultural figure of our time, and with its deft cutting and splicing, abrupt tonal shifts, subtle repetitions, inherent impatience, urgent rhythm, and jagged dissonances,
Speedboat
deploys basic deejay strategies. Distrustful of long forms—suites, albums, Great Works—and unconvinced that they were an effective way of rendering the jitters of life in the late twentieth century, Adler conjured a novel whose angular brilliance is how deftly it sampled the sounds and rhythms of contemporary life.

“The deejay thing makes sense to me,” Adler told me. “Music, particularly music with melody, has direct access to a whole range of feeling, which strictly modernist or atonal music does not. Traditional, classic fiction could also address that entire range of thought and feeling; soap operas can reach it. But strict high-modernist fiction tends to dismiss most appeals to emotion, sentiment, caring about characters and what happens to them, as cheap, as kitsch, and stays in a chilly range. Irony, humor, frissons of shock, a certain wistful, rueful quality, but that’s it. Nothing to make you cry, care about characters, want things for them. You couldn’t be, say, Dickens now, or George Eliot, or Henry James. Or maybe you could write like them, with luck, but it would not be true to our time, false somehow. For those effects you have to go back to the originals. I love modernist effects, but I mean Kafka, though perfect, is frosty. So I wondered, is there a way, in these times, to get conventional feeling in there? I don’t think I managed, except sporadically, until
Pitch Dark
. Maybe not even then.”

“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.”