Speedboat

Lou Reed - New York Telephone Conversation

I'm honestly not sure if I love or hate this novel. (And I just mistyped "love" as "live". Synonym of some kind, I guess.) It's at once so unbelievably clever, and so unbearably conscious and smug about it.

Whenever someone has been quite struck down, lost faculties, members of his family, he is said to have "joked with his nurses" quite a lot. What a mine of humor every nurse's life must be.

I won't try to summarize it; there's either nothing or everything to summarize. A series of hundreds of loosely connected episodes, most of them just a single paragraph, all of them immensely quotable to the point where I dogear every other page, while at the same time stabbing the self-absorbedness of clever New Yorkian artsiness through the kidneys with a sharp but rusty blade.

The chancellor of our branch of the university once asked me what I thought of the head of our division now. I said I thought he was a thug. "Ah," she said, with a chiming laugh and a lilt, clapping her hands just once. "You writers! What a way you have with words."

When I read Stoner recently I was intrigued by the question of what made that forgotten novel so timely now. No need to wonder with Speedboat, which reads like a twitter novel but very obviously isn't. It's a critic's novel, in the way it scrutinizes its own characters, pouncing on every malapropism, cliche and awkward social interaction of the characters, but also in the way it challenges the reader to piece it together. Several different storylines chopped up and stitched together - this must be what it's like to be a character in a Pynchon novel - in a way that begs to be diagrammed (though I actually like it the way it is). It's also very obiously a work of the 70s, the leftovers of the Vietnam protests, civil rights movements, women's lib and political conviction left flopping on the sidewalk of the 1970s.

It turned out that every single child on the school bus had known that one of their Kevins was missing. They had not mentioned it to the driver, or their teacher, or each other. They took it that Kevin had been left, forever, for some reason, which would become clear to them, with patience, in the course of time.

A recent New York Times article (which is what the characters of this book would discuss ad nauseam) argued that the last literary taboo is boredom. Bull. Speedboat, while never boring, is definitely a novel of boredom. Lots of stuff happens; none of it seems to matter much, it's all just words, words, words. The narrator observes, snarks, rolls her eyes and scatters witticisms around herself like a shotgun designed by Woody Allen. There's real life somewhere in it, but every crack is quickly and deliberately glossed over.

When I wonder what it is that we are doing - in this brownstone, on this block, with this paper - the truth is probably that we are fighting for our lives.

Etc etc. I can't out-clever Adler. I can't point out anything about this novel it doesn't itself do, with a dismissive "darling" tacked on at the end.

Lloyd Cole - Speedboat