Ice Cold

Happy summer everyone. I assure you I am reading Speedboat, but I do not like it! And so I can't think of much to say about it. It's just ice cold, man. Too cool for school. It's hard core New York city, stone cold, blank faced, bump-into-you-on-the-street-and-not-look-up-from-the-sidewalk stuff. Step-over-a-drunk-on-the-sidewalk stuff. Intellectualizing-sadness stuff. I mean to say - it's boring.

I understand what Adler was aiming at. She's obviously very very smart. And she's trying to capture the whip smart, independent, single youth of NYC. Fine. But it's leaving me cold. Maybe it's just me.

I think I'm looking for the hard on the outside, soft on the inside reality of 99% of people but she's writing characters that are hard on the outside and blank on the inside.

From a review on Slate:  "Speedboat belongs to a genre of '70s women’s fiction, in which a damaged, smart woman floats passively yet stylishly through the world." [...] "In all of these Smart Woman Adrift novels, there is a radical fragmentedness, a supremely controlled tone, a shrewd and jaded observation of small things, a comic or wry apprehension of life’s absurdities, and pretty yet melancholy vignettes of the state of being lost."

Yes, I know. That's the whole point. I think I'm looking for love in the wrong book. The real fear: I would have loved this book when I was 19. It's got that disaffected youth vibe, like Catcher in the Rye for girls with good jobs.

Also, Speedboat feels like an object of the 70s. It was trying to be cool, reflecting the culture as a whole. Now, it's cool to be candid. Irony is out. Sincerity is in. Emotional honesty is all the rage. The importance of the honest individual. You can see it on TV with shows like Parks and Recreation or in all the raw, cathartic memoirs like Wild, Life After Death, et. al.

Sorry, I'll keep reading it. Maybe I'll change my mind.