Basilisk

By Paul Gray

SPEEDBOAT

by RENATA ADLER

178 pages. Random House. $7.95.

Many people believe that a book called a novel will offer a group of characters moving along a plot line with something approximating forward momentum. Many are also equally certain that they have heard quite enough, thank you, about the miseries of Manhattan neurotics. Normally, such convictions are not only sound but healthy; when acted upon, they protect the wary reader from a good deal of gibberish and whining. Still, any critical principle worth holding is also worth ignoring if a good occasion arises. Speedboat--a non-novel novel about Manhattan neurotics--is such an occasion.

New Yorker Journalist Renata Adler's special purview has often been the odd schizophrenia induced in those Americans who came of age (as she did) in the 1950s--a generation that was too young to cheer the System and too old to blow it up. The seven stories in Speedboat, though cast as fiction, really form an extended reporter's notebook on the same story: the many ways that agreeable, hypereducated people find to go slowly bonkers.

Land Mine. The stories--or rather, the collage of perceptions--are told by a woman whose last name is Fain and whose first name may be Jennifer (one friend, at least, calls her Jen). Success seems to have fallen on her from a great height. She traipses obligingly but glumly through a succession of jobs usually thought to be desirable: newspaper reporter, foundation consultant, college teacher, congressional staff worker. She is clearly getting somewhere; where, exactly, and whether it is a place worth being are answers that elude her. "Things," she muses, "have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them."

Fain or no Fain, the author of that sentence is Renata Adler. Who else could hide a land mine under well-tended prose with quite as much apparent innocence? It takes a second or two to realize that intellectuals have been exempted from the frantic metamorphoses demanded by modern life. Why? The answer comes in bits and pieces: anyone who accepts (or demands) the label intellectual is automatically too dumb to deserve it. To prove the point, Adler puts her heroine through a year of teaching, "by mistake," at a Manhattan college, surrounded by "feather bedding illiterates" and "reactionary pedants." Visiting Professor Fain notes: "Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours by Appointment; that is, never." Students are awarded "Prior Life Experience" credits for such things as raking famous people's lawns. This may look like slapstick. But it sounds, to anyone who has brushed against academe, horribly true. Paragraph by paragraph, vignette by vignette, Speedboat hilariously builds an unsettling case: truth is slapstick. No wonder attentive, sensitive people begin to go weird: "A 'self-addressed envelope,' if you are inclined to brood, raises deep questions of identity."

Such semantic fastidiousness is more common in philosophy than in fiction, and Adler's stories are more successful as illustrated lectures than as riveting narrative. It should be added that Adler is almost always a riveting lecturer. Like the legendary basilisk, she can look at a subject and turn it to stone. Speedboat is a cascade of smooth and shiny pebbles.

Paul Gray

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