A little loving irony

It doesn’t mean much to say that Renata Adler’s journalism isn’t as interesting as her novels — almost nothing is as interesting as Renata Adler’s novels. In 2013, the American publishing house New York Review Books reissued her two slim novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark. These had been cultish hits when they were first published, 30 years earlier, and it was easy to see why. They are excellent skewers of the complacency and pomp of American society and fashion: funny, manic, memorable and made up of tiny, brilliant scenes. ‘Her husband had invented a calorie-free spaghetti from seaweed,’ she writes of one party guest: ‘He was the world’s yet unacknowledged living authority on seaweed and its many uses. She was quite eloquent about it. I was interested for nearly seven hours.’ On republication, people loved these two novels all over again, and now the same publishers have, very sensibly, issued a new selection of Adler’s other writings, mostly long New Yorker-ish essays and some heavyweight reviews.

Adler’s subjects are the institutions of American cultural and political life: the government and the media, demonstrations and marches, the National Guard and the Supreme Court. Specifically, she’s interested in newspapers and films, and spent a year as the film critic for the New York Times. Included here is her hatchet-job on the film critic Pauline Kael (‘She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favourite words’).

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Beneath all this, what draws her is the way people talk. At a civil rights march in 1965, she overhears one student: ‘I’m worried, though, about the Maoists.’ At a conference for radical political groups, in Chicago in 1967, she listens to the delegates. ‘What is the criterion for being black?’ someone asks. Whole cultural moments are conjured in these tiny phrases and it is tempting to — like Adler — simply quote them without any editorial comment.