Other people are just discovering her journalism.
Some people adore her fiction: her two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), were reprinted to fresh accolades in 2013. Her reputation, in mid-2015, feels floaty and diffracted-quite Internet, really, in that it doesn’t completely scan, and it has an undertow. Adler, now 76, has always written as if she’s never taken a drug in her life-as if the fiercest, purest jinni of a mind-expanding molecule, upon approaching the crystal ramparts of her consciousness, would wither up in shame. And knowing this, I understand that there is something truly, yes, psychedelic about Renata Adler. I know that within a year, this band in which she is not particularly interested, Love, will record Forever Changes, a glassy, paranoid masterpiece, an album worthy of her own freakishly advanced sensibilities: And the water’s turned to blood / And if you don’t think so / Go turn on your tub. I love this little moment-in-prose-from “Fly Trans-Love Airways,” one of the pieces collected in After the Tall Timber, a career-spanning new anthology of Adler’s nonfiction-because, just for a second, I know something Renata Adler doesn’t. It is playing “with a kind of driving, electronic desperation,” and at the end of a song the crowd gives “a kind of desperation cheer, as one might cheer an acquittal verdict for a defendant against whom the case looked bad.” She has been observing, in that limpid, discarnate New Yorker style-as if the writer’s brains have been preserved in a mason jar, with a single watchful orb of an eyeball floatingly attached-the local non-culture: the street preacher with his “practiced homiletic quaver” the hippie girl who says “Sometimes I think I’m dead and I’m hallucinating the whole thing” the general sensation of a vague and rootless millenarianism, in which “there is nothing to do but to wait in some small café for the coming of the Word.” Now, at the Hullabaloo, with members of the Monkees and the Mamas & the Papas alongside her in the audience, Adler is watching the band Love. It’s 1967, it’s 5 in the morning, and Renata Adler, a 28-year-old reporter for The New Yorker, is at a club on the Sunset Strip.
0 kommentar(er)
