In 1978 I heard about a novel that was formally unusual. Parts of it had been published in the New Yorker between 1971 and 1976. The novel, Speedboat, by Renata Adler, was described in a way that piqued my interest considerably. I had read Kerouac’s On the Road in 1962, my last year at school, and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch shortly after that. By the time I’d come across Beckett’s Watt in the mid 60s I had a strong sense of the kind of reading I would pursue for the foreseeable future.
Reviewers said that Adler’s book was fragmented and experimental. That was enough for me. It had chapters with titles but every chapter was divided into a succession of small clusters of paragraphs framing a succession of anecdotes that were variously funny, tragic or funny and tragic. The anecdotes were about strange people living in unsatisfactory buildings and areas in New York and their adventures and misadventures that were received, by them, with either excessive or minimal affect. The paragraphs were rarely sequentially related but the events in them were all retailed by the same narrator, a young woman journalist finding her way in New York. This young woman was herself not overly emotional, having at times an almost Warholian distance from the collisions and calamities that beset her acquaintances.
I enjoyed it, partly because it was experimental and I was anxious to maintain a steady input of experimental culture and partly because it was enjoyable.
I gave a copy to my elder daughter when she was about 25. She found it interesting but I don’t think she particularly liked it. I was surprised to find it was still in print back then.
A few days ago I wondered if I still had my copy somewhere. I did. I eased the slender UK Picador from the bookshelf and started reading again. I found that the structural characteristics of the book – its plotless, vignetted anecdotal style – had, in the last 47 years, become unexceptional. The successive sections eventually succumb to a predictable rhythm independent of their content and this has a muffling effect on the liveliness of some of the events described. Also the flattened, jaded reactions of the narrator to events that are startling, despicable, infuriating, strange, hilarious and so forth are now aspects of a tone widely apparent in the barely-committal matter-of-fact that’s-the-way-it-is shit-happens it’s-sad but-what-can-you-do urban disaffection applied to their fictional characters by writers as dissimilar as, back in the day, Donald Barthelme (less dispirited than Adler) or, more recently, Brett Easton-Ellis and Patricia Lockwood. The two latter will isolate events but do not withhold a continuity that develops the narrator in order to depict the exhausted landscape through which they pass.
This reduced but stylised engagement is found in the reporting, by some fiction writers, of shocking or just eventful, events in a reluctant, reproachful tone that suggests a disappointed innocence, a doleful acceptance of something that is all too revealing of how fucked up everything is. So fucked up. I like this tone – it may be low on detail but executed without too much self-pity it can be entertaining.
Reduced affect as a response to an unmanageable volume of potentially destabilising inputs presents as a wearied, listless detachment or, as above, the stylistic equivalent of an expressionless cool on the Warhol/Clint Eastwood spectrum.
The stance is not, in a literary context, as conservative as it sounds – its minimality is often witty and provocatively compact. It attests to a reluctant assessment of a world whose myriad dysfunctions have overwhelmed the human capacity to analyse causalities or organise responses.
None of which diverts me from page 67. Where, to my great surprise, I read, in an account of the author’s flying lessons, ‘To stall, you deliberately climb too sharply, until you feel the engine cough. The plane shivers slightly. That’s a stall. It is time to push the nose down and the throttle fully up. R. D. Laing aside, it seems to be the only way to level off.’
The radical anti-psychiatrist Ronald Laing had published, in 1960, his controversial and widely read ‘The Divided Self’ in which he proposed a fundamental revision of attitudes to madness, advocating that it should not be arrested or medicated or treated with electroshock or other punishments but seen as a potentially liberating journey that should be completed.
The book received considerable attention and sold 700,000 copies in Laing’s lifetime. It was eagerly taken up by lay readers and revered by those engaged with 60s and 70s counter-culture.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Laing’s ideas had been current in America. A quick search confirms that in the early 70s he was published there and carried out lecture tours. I think it was my own experience with him that somehow made me think that he never left the UK. After a series of terrifying LSD trips in 1963 I made an appointment with Laing who, after a conversation in London, referred me to his colleague David Cooper, another radical anti-psychiatrist. My four year analysis with the latter was colourful to a fault and ended when Cooper took LSD, broke his leg, became alcoholic and went mad. (This is a very compressed account of events.)
Adler (Renata not Alfred) sets R. D. Laing aside in order literally to manage a stalling aircraft rather than taking up his recommendation to allow the condition to develop into a catastrophic conclusion which, in the anti-psychiatric view, would open up a path for renewal. Turning away from flight-as-metaphor she settles for the tried and tested solution: pull the nose down silly billy!
I think in the late 70s that while I was pleased to savour the languor of Speedboat’s narrator, I was more impressed by the novel’s formal experiment which has since become well established in the suburbs of the mainstream of literary fiction.
It would be gratifying if the attitude to madness promoted by the Laingians in the 60s had achieved much wider acceptance. However, an acknowledgement of the superabundance of attention-capturing events and the consequent disintegration of experience is now reflected in all the arts and compels the viewer to cultivate a taste for incoherence that sails close to the shores of derangement.
01/2025