Speedboat (novel)

Prior to Speedboat, Adler was largely known for her nonfiction reportage in The New Yorker, and while Speedboat is billed as a novel it includes actual incidents and autobiographical elements; as Adler once remarked, "Some of it was real."[1] When the book was published in 1976, the 39-year-old Adler had temporarily left writing to become a first-year student at Yale Law School. "I guess I didn’t know what was going to happen when Speedboat came out," she later said. "I thought, I better be in law school, because who knows whether anyone will like it or not."[2] Speedboat received critical acclaim and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best debut work by an American writer of fiction. The prize was judged by E. L. Doctorow, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag.[3]

The novel fell out of print in 1988 but remained a cult enthusiasm; while teaching at Pomona College, David Foster Wallace included Speedboat on the syllabus for a course on "obscure/eclectic fictions," and in 2000 David Shields declared it "one of the most original and formally exciting American novels published in the past 25 years."[4][5]

In 2013, Speedboat was reissued by New York Review Books simultaneously with Adler's second novel, Pitch Dark; both works enjoyed a renewed wave of attention.[2] The Chicago Tribune referred to Speedboat as a "perfect novel," and Anna Wiener wrote in The New Republic that, "Out of the blue, it seemed like everyone I knew was reading and discussing Adler....New York City booksellers pushed [Speedboat] as a recovered sacred text [and] Adler earned a new coterie of readers." [6][7] Writers such as Ezra Furman,[8] Rachel Khong,[9] Jenny Offill,[10] and Kate Zambreno[11] have subsequently cited Speedboat as an influence.