Pitch Dark

In her interview with Alice Gregory in the June 2013 edition of The Believer, Renata Adler talks about how a critic once wrote about her work: "This person writes so badly that it sets your teeth on edge." Adler found this particular critique of her work to be fair and balanced - the writer gave specific examples of Adler's writing in her piece. Those examples happened to be Adler's favorite parts, the best she felt she could achieve, so it was clear that it was a case of her work just not being [...]

"Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn't, or loves less, or loves someone else. Or someone is a good soul and someone a villain. And there are just these episodes, anecdotes, places, pauses, hailings of cabs, overcomings of obstacles, or instances of being overcome by them, illnesses, accidents, recoveries, wars, desires, welcomings, rebuffs, baskings (rare, not so long), pinings (more frequent, perhaps, and longer), actions, failures to act, hesitations, prolifera [...]

A wonderful book, and I defer to the superior skills of the other GR reviewers who have reviewed this already, and so well. I will, however, as is becoming something of a schtick, look at a short sentence of hers to demonstrate her craft. Here are five versions of the same sentence: 1. By accident, did I throw the most important thing away? 2. Did I, by accident, throw the most important thing away? 3. Did I throw, by accident, the most important thing away? 4. Did I throw the most important thi [...]

"We were running flat out. The opening was dazzling. The middle was dazzling. It was like a steeplechase composed entirely of hurdles.But that would not be a steeplechase at all. It would be more like a steep, steep climb.They were shouting, Tell it, big momma, tell it. I mean, the child is only six years old.Do I need to stylize it, then, or can I tell it as it was?"Seemingly, this opening of Pitch Dark is telling and foretelling about an adult love relationship. However, Adler tucks in the chi [...]

But the nearest analogue, as a business, to the law lies not in business but in the military, as it prepares for war.There was all the difference in the world between the beneficiaries of what they were on the boards of and anyone who actually depended on them.How many thought that she was going to be raped? Seriously, though. The narrator goes off by herself to a foreign country only to drive around in the middle of the night and interact with a lot of shifty men, and not once during the whole [...]

This is not a book about the end of an affair. It is about a brilliant woman, Kate Ennis, and an affair that she has. We know very little about the man in the affair, Jake, which reinforces my notion that this is not a book about the affair. Even after it ends, Kate seems to still have this affair, she seems to possess it. It seems like she has it in a jar and watches. And is she in the jar? Is she out of it? When the clouds shift, for one moment, or for several moments, and there is a possibili [...]

I was zipping along with this novel for a while, appreciating the frenetic felicity of her style, then we lapsed into an extremely long ramble around rural Ireland, and my interest suddenly leapt off a cliff. This being the one novel I poached from Munich’s tremendous English-language bookshop The Munich Readery (run by an American with a stock including Barth, Barthelme, Cortazar, et al), I am fairly peeved.

"How could I know that every time you had a chance to choose you would choose the other thing?"This is a book about heartbreak. But it isn't a conventional novel about the end of a years-long affair between a journalist and a married man. Like "Speedboat," Renata Adler's brilliant first novel, it is a story told in fragments, an accumulation of thoughts, incidents, conversations and, most notably, a long (for Adler) nightmarish section describing a pitch dark night in rural Ireland, where Kate E [...]

When someone needs an ear rather than problem solving, I listen and don't give advice. Generally, people don't want advice. They want to ventilate their hearts, make their own choices, and have these choices affirmed. Friends and loved ones expect this. Renate Adler asks the reader for a novel-length session of this pose, listening to the narrator feel overwhelmed by tiny problems when she actually wants to spin her wheels about her married-man problem.I was biased. I set out to like this one mo [...]

I read this before Speedboat for no particular reason – because it was close at hand – and despite some confusion re its jagged/jump-cut structure I liked it a lot. This is one slick, hard-boiled construction, hand-buffed to perfection but retaining all the risk-taking verve of a first draft, able to lurch wildly across the width and breadth of Adler’s concerns without seeming random, the type of book that makes you question your own comprehension before you question its sense. In between, [...]

“What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it’s more like one afternoon, and it’s not just unsaid, it’s gone. That’s all. Just gone. I remember this word, that look, that small inflection, after all this time. I used to hold them, trust them, read them like a rune. Like a sign that there was a house, a billet, a civilization where we were. I look back and I think I was just there all alone. Collecting wisps and signs. Like a spinster who did know [...]

You can rely too much, my love, on the unspoken things. And the wry smile. I have that smile myself and I’ve learned the silence, too, over the years. Along with your expressions, like No notion and Of necessity. What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it’s more like late one afternoon, and it’s not just unsaid, it’s gone. That’s all. Just gone.A fascinating book told in a fragmented start-stop-startover-shift-tellsomethingesle style (at least [...]

Was there something I did, you think, or might have done, I ask you that, some thing I did not do, and might have done, that would have kept you with me yet a while?In the Afterword, Sparks notes “It seems excessive for a very bright woman still to be in love with Jake.”This is more than having an affair with a married man. Displaying bits and pieces of excessive paranoia as Kate attempts to separate from her married lover, you begin to see her falling apart, questioning time and again…sho [...]

We're told by Muriel Spark, who provides an "Afterword" to this edition of Pitch Dark, that it's a love story. And it's a portrait of a woman, Kate Ennis, who's in love but on the run. The first two parts of the novel find her traveling to try and forget the relationship she's recently ended with a married lover of eight years. She's fled to Orcas Island in Puget Sound. Then she's in Ireland as guest at the castle of an acquaintance. And then she's back home as she works toward a decision. Pitch [...]

Oooo. Ooo! Wow! What fabulous, fabulous prose. Adler is a tremendously skilled stylist, I can't even say how much I enjoyed this. About a woman in early-middle (?) age reminiscing on a long time affair, and on a misadventure in Ireland, and about many, many other events that have happened to her. It is written in this peculiar, discursive style, with the first and third sections in particular consisting of memories and observations which have no real narrative link, but maintain a certain contin [...]

Well, this was a pleasant surprise after I failed to connect with Speedboat a few years back. Here, Adler's narrator Kate, a journalist, is in the final throes of a long affair with a married man. The affair is only the bare framework of the novel, though, as Kate is prone to digressions in the telling. Needing some space to think and reflect, she travels to Ireland where paranoia takes hold, lacing her time there with a vague menace that may or may not truly exist outside her mind. Adler writes [...]

Renata Adler's mania for the law, and for the hyper specific language and intolerance for blurry thinking implicit in legal training, crashes into this sequel to Adler's earlier, funnier, Resnais-like SPEEDBOAT. Here, fragments of an unhappy affair with an unavailable married man flicker between Adler's usual hyperclose, uptight, insanely pedantic descriptions of ordinary events--the "bravura set piece" of which is a long, creepy night driving around winding roads in Ireland that builds to s pre [...]

Review published in 3:AM Magazine: 3ammagazine/3am/centur

What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it's more like late afternoon, and it's not just unsaid, it's gone. That's all. Just gone. I remember this word, that look, that small inflection, after all this time. I used to hold them, trust them, read them like a rune. Like a sign that there was a house, a billet, a civilization where we were. I look back and I think I was just there all alone.I read that when Renata Adler wrote Speedboat, she deliberately omi [...]

Stream of consciousness and thus non-linear w/o a concise plot. Brilliant but lonely woman attempts to escape her 9-yr affair w/ a married man by taking a trip to Ireland; a bizarre set of circumstances involving her rental car provide the backbone of the story, but the central theme is that of seeking to understand the realities of love and life - when did she take a path, and where did it lead her?Adler nails this writing style - I found myself keeping notes of thoughts that recurred w/in the [...]

"And this matter of the commas. And this matter of the paragraphs. The true comma. The pause comma. The afterthought comma. The hesitation comma. The rhythm comma. The blues."Pitch Dark is kind of about a no-longer-young-but-not-yet-old white lady trying to forget the married man she has had a long affair with. She has an encounter with a raccoon that reminds her of him. She also gets into a minor car accident in Ireland that leaves her to take extreme measures to escape some opportunistic local [...]

Pitch Dark, was a unique and definitely a brain read. I feel this story was more of her allowing darkness to leave her body. Purge. Purge of what? Her disbelief in a higher power? Her transgressions? After all, she did love in a way that was confused with another's ideology of love so deeply rooted in the human psyche.Her impetuous temperament seems to have been the reason she looked at everything in such a negative wayEveryone out to get her or judging hering her."Did I throw the most important [...]

For every woman who has ever been told "I love you" by an occupied man.

the first act is some of the absolute most heartbreaking fiction i have ever read. definitely loses steam but i savored reading this and am sincerely quite sad there are no more renata adler novels left for me to read

I picked up this book after falling in love with Rachel Khong's Goodbye, Vitamin. At her book launch at Green Apple, Khong mentioned that Renata Adler was one of the authors whose books she always kept nearby.The narrative doesn't follow a straight path - you jump through time, place, and perspective quickly and it can sometimes be hard to keep up. One of my favorite moments is when the narrator, Kate, discovers a sick raccoon that has been living in her kitchen. She has no idea how it got in th [...]

In many ways this book is even better than Speedboat. It feels like a more complete novel, with the anecdotal, observant, and brutally analytical style that Adler used in her first book. It's also filled with little tricks and jabs, that are hard to understand but I think work as a whole to make this book, as the back copy so succinctly points out, a book of questions. I love a book that brings up questions, mostly that cannot be answered. At the same time it lacks a bit of the powerful voice fr [...]

"Wait a minute. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine."The only word I can use to describe this book: hypnoticke Adler's other novel, Speedboat, Pitch Dark is a nonlinear, discontinuous narrative. There is little conventional exposition--that is, in a sense, major elements of story are never clearly exposed. The novel centers on, begins with a separation between two lovers, Kate and Jake. Jake is married to someone else; Kate is the narrator. In the afterword to the NYRB edition, Mur [...]

Here is a novel built from the interior fragments of a wildly articulate, sensitive, rational person. Its disjointed structure and self-conscious language made me remember "Sleepless Nights" by Elizabeth Hardwick. Like "Pitch Dark," "Sleepless Nights" was reprinted by New York Review of Books, and is a collage of memories. Compared to Hardwick, Adler is less profound and less pleasant (think long digressions about exits on the road to Dublin, and neurotic preparation for a peat fireis is not for [...]

While I'm not entirely sure if I'm smart enough to get this book, it's completely compelling - enough so that I immediately purchased Speedboat and plan on reading it presently. This is essentially episodic but also musical. Forgive the lapsed music-critic speech but: imagine if The White Album were more like Pictures at an Exhibition. Pitch Dark is filled with short half-thoughts and wild anarchic passages that sit uneasily next to ambitious set-pieces and ironic genre-experiments, like The Bea [...]

Definitely not like any other book I've ever read--and probably best read in one sitting, or maybe two, which I was unable to do. So I found myself falling out of it, in between readings--Pitch Dark is so intense and so non-linear, so deeply interior, that leaving the speaker's world to do something ordinary, like wash dishes or go to work, made re-entering the book almost painful; but once I was in the midst of it again I was completely immersed. There's almost nothing of the traditional novel [...]