Speedboat [Paperback]

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. 

When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it.
       
A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthrall a new generation of readers. [Speedboat] feels like a book that has somehow always existed, just as much as one that maybe never has. The feel of a total accident, and yet one that could only have happened in exactly the way it did. . . . The sentences are thrilling to the point of overload—delirious, worldly, probing, wry. And yet the book’s most arresting feat is its ability to inhabit a moment so clearly, so lucidly, that nothing outside of its momentary aperture seems of any importance. —David Byron Queen, The Review of unContemporary Fiction

“Ms. Adler’s writing has turned out to be prescient and quietly influential, and her debut novel cast a long shadow on what I consider to be the strongest works of fiction published this year. Speedboat does not prescribe to any novelistic convention—namely, plot (linel)