Renata Adler stood perched against a makeshift podium, her long, dangling braid slumped over her shoulder. Addressing an oddly reverential audience of people half her age packed into the temporary home of Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Adler, the 74-year-old longtime staff writer for the New Yorker, read passages from two recently reissued novels, “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark,” interjecting quips, asides, jokes, and questions directed at the crowd in between the excerpts. The performance was apt, a mirror image of her prose, and decidedly unlike most readings today in that it didn’t feel prepared or rehearsed. It was natural, informal – a conversation rather than a lecture. On the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who Adler said she struggled reading but now thinks is one of the most important writers of our time, she commented, in a hushed tone:
“Things that are really good, they’ll be there.”
I couldn’t have been the only one who, for a second at least, thought she might have been referring to herself.
Even though she has written very little in the last two decades, Adler’s myth lingers in the shadowy halls of literary culture in New York City, as evidenced by the cavalcade of reviews, profiles, and interviews. Her reputation is unfairly, and suspectly, marked as troublesome, more an indictment of how we judge female writers than Adler’s actual work. Not to discredit Norman Mailer, but we still celebrate his work even though the guy stabbed his wife.
In the 1960s, as a young journalist at the New Yorker, Adler reported from the civil rights marches at Selma, from Saigon, and from the Six Day War. She wrote speeches for Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s inquiry into the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Strom Thurmond condemned her in Congress over a review of “The Green Berets,” starring John Wayne (“It is vile and insane. On top of that, it is dull”). At arguably the height of her career, she decided to go to law school. It is said she registered as a Republican just to be the first one who voted against Barry Goldwater.
Unfortunately, she is hardly remembered for any of that. If young writers are aware of her existence at all, it is most likely through “The Perils of Pauline,” a detailed polemic against Pauline Kael in the New York Review of Books, where Adler famously referred to the film critic’s work as “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” A notoriously deft critic, she followed that up by pulling apart Kael’s reviews, line by line, revealing the “most unmistakable marks of the hack.” It’s widely considered one of the most infamous hatchet-jobs in criticism. What’s not often said is that it’s one of the most measured critiques of a writer that has ever existed in print. Adler would sporadically appear in print over the next three decades, before quietly disappearing from the page altogether.
But that might soon change. What the current reception to “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark,” 30 years after their initial publication, prove, is that a writer’s work often requires time to catch up with its rejection of prescriptive literary etiquette. Adler’s fragmented narratives, devoid of conventional plot, derive their tension through an unspoken shattering of the traditional fiction/non-fiction divide. There is a push-and-pull between the reportorial or external, and the fictitious or internal modes – what the writer David Shields calls “consciousness drenched.”
“I’m not sure now, if they were published, you would necessarily call them novels,” Shields told me in a recent interview. “They are remarkable books that blow genre apart, this amazing mix of stand-up comedy, confession, biography, fiction, parable, and literary fiction.”
It’s not that metafiction, or whatever people are calling it these days, didn’t exist when “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark” were first published, but that the lines were more clearly drawn. Nobody was confusing John Updike and John Barth. Adler’s novels don’t stake their claim on one side or the other, making them harder to define. They are open-ended and present a strong argument about fiction’s relation to reality, and if it can somehow reveal truths objective journalism can’t present.
Toward the end of her reading, Adler assured the audience that she is almost finished with what she thinks is a third novel, her first in 30 years. “In a funny way, it doesn’t go the way these go,” she said, referring to her previous books. “I think, and I wasn’t really aware of this because I was so incompetent at it, with a computer, the Internet, emails, all that stuff, but the discontinuities that are there, say on Twitter, the one-liners, now I’m going the other way. I want it not to be that.”
We have finally caught up with Renata Adler, and she’s turning the other way.