What is a Novel?
Speedboat qualifies as an experimental novel, that’s for sure. Not quite as out there as Finnegan’s Wake, mind you—one can easily enough follow what’s going on because of a lack of reliance on made up words or absence of punctuation or things like that. It is experimental more in terms of content and linear structure. Sometimes it seems like a memoir. At other times it comes across more as collection of short vignettes or sketches that are only loosely tied together with enough tension to allow it be categorized as a novel. But then again, most novels one has ever read would appear to be equally experimental to those writers who invented the form. The novel is notable for existing in a constant state of flux, always evolving and never quite looking exactly at it used to. It may be that not enough readers have caught up to Adler’s vision yet. One day, well into the future, perhaps, Speedboat will longer be considered experimental at all.
Reader Participation
The novel—or whatever the book is—qualifies as an exercise in reader participation. It has been said that that there are really only two kinds of writers, put-er-inners and take-er-outers. This refers to the editing process: the first draft for some writers is much thinner than the final draft and vice versa. The world of writers could equally well be split evenly among those who do all the work for the reader and those who want to shift the workload onto the writer. About midway through the book, the narrator briefly digresses to tell the reader about two barbers, Lewis and Florian. Lewis hates for his customers to talk, Florian invites conversation. The short paragraph ends with Lewis quoted as saying someday he’s going to kill Florian.
Ten pages later Lewis pops up again, this time having a conversation with an eight-year-old customer whose bill has gone unpaid. The upshot is that a divorce is underway and neither father nor mother look likely to take care of the bill, Lewis the barber sends the kid on his way. He’s never mentioned again and it remains fully up to the reader to determine how and why this digression fits into the overall narrative. Or, for that matter, if it fits in at all.
Modern Life
The structure of the novel can be seen thematically as a replication of modern life just as much as the novels of the 19th century reflected that period. Those novels were featured long, gracefully composed sentences within long paragraphs within long chapters within a long novel. People had time to read back then and, more importantly, they wanted a place to go to that was not their daily life because daily life was excruciating repetitive. Those long detailed descriptions of everything inside a room designed to transport a reader from their life into a sumptuous existence unlike their own life are directly at odds with the construction of Speedboat. There are long paragraphs, to be sure, but even within them there is kinetic energy taking the reader’s attention to several places at once. The story of Lewis is just one example of many of characters who show up and disappear. Things happen that have no bearing on anything else. The world is whizzing by within the pages of the whatever you want to call this book and it looks a lot like the world around us.
