We encounter the inhabitants of Jen’s brownstone in New York, friends and acquaintances, taxi drivers, and some of the subjects of her journalistic dispatches from around the world. What we have here is a series of fragments from the life of an American investigative journalist, Jen Fain, seen through the eyes of this woman as she is our narrator, our guide through this fascinating work.Įpisodic in style and form, Speedboat presents a collection of Jen’s reflections, observations and vignettes from a variety of stages in her life ranging from her days at boarding school and college, her time as an investigative journalist, as a speech writer for a political candidate and more.
The notes on the back of my NYRB Classics edition state that when Speedboat arrived in the mid-seventies, it was ‘like nothing readers had ever encountered before.’ Speedboat doesn’t follow a conventional narrative arc nor does it possess a noticeable plot as such. Her first novel, Speedboat, published in 1976 won the Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel. Renata Adler is an American author, journalist and critic – she worked for The New Yorker for over four decades.
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