=Book recently read: Speedboat by Renata Adler=

What's the point of the story? 
    You cannot be forever watching for the point, Renata Adler says, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

Speedboat is labeled "a novel"

because it would be harder to call it a

poem or a memoir or a cultural critique   

or a piece of journalism, although

it bears shades of all of these.

It is, in fact, that most unique of things:

a unique thing.

Guy Trebay offers up the comparison

 Speedboat seems to share with 

the practice of DJ "sampling," mixing tracks

& styles from disparate sources to form a patchwork

 that sounds like an amalgamation of our times.

Adler herself seems  to be somewhat

amenable to the comparison.

Anecdotes, aphorisms, memories, reportage,

cultural observations, gossip,

snarky asides, intimate revelations from her own

personal life—these are all

confided to the reader in Speedboat, as if they

had happened to the book's narrator, a reporter

Adler calls Jen Fein.

But you never believe Jen Fein exists for a moment.

You don't care about her as a character,

the way you're supposed to if she were a character in a 

traditional novel. She's barely even named

in Speedboat. If you blink, you

won't catch her existence.

If she died on page 47, you wouldn't

give a damn. The text 

would go on blithely without her.

She wouldn't be missed.

She isn't necessary.

You're never under any "novelistic" illusions. 

Speedboat is Renata Adler talking from

  stem to stern.

If I were to compare Speedboat to any

other form, outside of that catch-all term 
"collage," I'd say  it were an updated form
of the traditional Japanese pillow book, or, 
again, the Japanese "essay" called the 
zuihitsu: a free-form

kind of musing on whatever topic interests

the author at the moment, a dance of the mind, 
the all-but-ineluctable path of the intellect
moving from place to place,
landing only briefly, 
lightly followed by the hand holding the brush.

                   There is no plot, no "characters" in the  novelistic, that is to say, invented sense of the term, no theme…there is just a consciousness making itself known in words. It is the consciousness aware of itself that weaves the whole together, that provides an underlying rhythm, that makes the thing, as a whole, cohere. 

The power of Speedboat is such that you wonder why all books aren't written this way; the fascination it casts over you as you read it, the constant twists and turns and surprises it offers, not just from page to page or paragraph to paragraph, but from sentence to sentence, makes you wish all books were.