Like any number of memorable fictions, Speedboat, Adler’s first novel, is about the power of the author’s voice. Indeed, one could view the novel as a kind of bridge between those two poles, and what each looks like together and apart in our splintered, defined-by-truthiness world. What can it mean, then, when a reporter is paid to be ‘objective’? Is it even possible to do one’s work wholly as a reporter knowing that truth is specious, or, at best, a faulty enterprise? Speedboat is, among other things, about the tension between our subjective self, and the objective eye, the thing we see, and the stuff we feel. Does it matter what kind? Speedboat is riddled with facts, ‘real’ observations, all presented as fiction. The very act of describing a fact – describing anything – is to reveal one’s own subjectivity, and to become, in effect, a storyteller. ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant –’ So says Emily Dickinson, and part of the joy to be found in Adler’s short, dense and intellectually vast text is the author’s investigation into those various slants, including how language changes your mind, and how your mind changes language. And that’s because the author’s brilliant stop and start 1976 novel about a female reporter living in an unnamed city glistens with authenticity, not only when it comes to her protagonist Jen Fain’s career as a journalist, but all the existential stuff that fucks your head up as you go about the business of trying to report, including how to navigate the uneasy marriage of language and truth and back again.

I don’t know of any journalist who’s had the pleasure of reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat and not dreamt of writing a book ‘just’ like it.

Speedboat by Renata Adler