Speedboat
(Book)

"Much of the material in this book appeared originally in slightly different form in The New Yorker"--title page verso.

A series of vignettes which follow the life and travels of Jen Fain, a beautiful and intelligent journalist.

"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboat, Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, charged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of every man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension, and it is the story of Jen Fein, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Her voice is searching, cuttingly perceptive, and darkly funny as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it"--,Provided by publisher.

Ernest Hemingway Award, Best First Novel, 1976

PEN/Hemingway Award, 1977