A Sense of the Odd

It’s only incidental praise of Renata Adler to say that she has written one of the best books I know of about contemporary New York with her first novel. SPEEDBOAT (Random House. $7.95). But it could hardly have sprouted from any soil besides Manhattan concrete. You know where you are when a character, a young woman, is stopped on the street by an attractive, scholarly-seeming fellow who says he’s doing a study on urban contamination, and asks if he might “take a slide” from the bottom of her shoe. Then: “She felt a flash of unease the moment she leaned against a wall and raised her foot to take the shoe off. He was already on the sidewalk, quietly licking the sole. No passerby took any notice. In another moment, he had stood up and walked away.”

Speedboat is full of such . . . let’s say odd incidents (most of them less pathological than this one). It is, in fact, a collection of “incidents.” Calling it a novel perhaps stretches a point. It is a gathering of stories, most of which have been published over the last couple of years in The New Yorker, where Renata Adler is a staff writer. And the stories themselves are assemblages of small moments that lack the coherence of plot but nevertheless overlap and iridesce like the scales of a fish.

Although there are dozens of amusing walk-on figures, character in this book resides wholly in the voice of its faceless narrator. We learn that the voice belongs to a woman of about thirty-five, unmarried, a journalist, educated at an eastern private school for women, nicely connected, and addicted to observation. But what we learn of the circumstances of her life is more or less inconsequential: this is a novel of sensibility—it is all sensibility, and the only patterns of the book are the tracks a mind leaves in trying to come to terms with its surroundings.

The surroundings are the modern urban world, for which New York is the richest symbol, and the condition that Renata Adler addresses can be described in all sorts of sociological and artistic clichés. Anomie. Alienation. Absurdity. But the sensibility itself is not so easily categorized. It begins in wit. There are lines here that might have been written by Jane Austen if she were living at this hour in the East Sixties: “At twenty-six, Kate, though not promiscuous, had slept with most of the decent men in public life.” That, if you think about it, is a sentence of considerable resonance: by using two undefined words, it manages to suggest something about the meaninglessness of both of them.

The person we meet in Speedboat has an antiquarian affection for normality, but she is a compulsive collector of the new: new phrases, new behaviors, new lunacies. For instance:

The weather last Friday was terrible. The flight to Martha’s Vineyard was “decisional.”

“What does ‘decisional’ mean?” a small boy asked. “It means we might have to land in Hyannis,” his mother said. It is hard to understand how anyone learns anything.

He’s doing a political essay. It begins “Some things cannot be said too often, and some can.” That’s all he’s got so far.

There was a Pinkerton man in the elevator. “Something wrong?” Jim asked.

“Yeah.” he said. “A girl on the fifth floor has been molestated.”

If Renata Adler—not to make the mistake of assuming that she and her heroine are the same, though obviously they share some qualities—has a single, simple virtue, it’s that she trusts her own eyes. She doesn’t fail to see the pieces that don’t fit into the puzzle. (“The problem is this. Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in the literature.”) Her world is full of defeated expectations, stories without endings, crossed wires and missed connections; it is an epidemic of inappropriate response and loss of affect.

But for all its attention to modern woes, Speedboat is free of stock response. No lamentations of vulgarity. No intimations of systemic evil. No love of madness, no chic despair. It is the work of someone who simply won’t relinquish the right to say . . . “how strange.” Every page in this book is touched by humor, but beneath the mirth lies a sort of ferocity. Reflections on public piety; “ ‘He has suffered enough’ meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too.” And (a few lines later), on the mental health profession: “In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, ‘You’re too hard on yourself.’ ”

Renata Adler is a spare, self-possessed writer who can do more in an aphoristic aside than many novelists can do with a chapter. Her book now and then luxuriates unfairly in its own formlessness, but at its center it is disciplined and clear-headed. Although context makes the remark amusing and unpompous, she means it when she says. “I think sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time.”