The Eccentric, Inimitable Renata Adler
November 5, 2026
by Robin Lippincott, fiction and nonfiction faculty
I’m recycling and refurbishing this post about Renata Adler, originally written in 2013, because 1) she’s still alive (she’ll turn eighty-eight or eighty-nine this October) and should be acknowledged and celebrated, 2) because she remains, for me and many others, an important, influential writer, and 3) perhaps most importantly for the context of this blog, because as Lorin Stein, former editor of The Paris Review, once said: “Renata Adler should be required reading for MFA students.”
I’m rereading Renata Adler. Most people I mention her name to haven’t even heard of Renata Adler, but fiction writers should know her work. I’m referring, specifically, to her two novels, because Adler has also published collections of essays, a volume of film criticism (from her stint as chief movie critic for The New York Times), as well as books on law, including a short, damning treatise on the disastrous 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision; yes, in addition to everything else this brilliant woman has done, she has a law degree from Yale.
But between 1976 and 1983, Renata Adler published two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, and she has not published another novel since, although she has reportedly been working on one. When asked in a 2004 interview if she had given up writing fiction, Adler replied, “Oh, no. That’s what I really, that’s all I want to do.” She allegedly has a perfectionist’s almost pathological reluctance to publish her work: refreshing, no? I have been waiting for a new novel from her since 1984.
Why Renata Adler? Because she has written two novels that are unlike anybody else’s, novels that are whip smart and that create their own forms (and thus expand what a novel is), and because in those novels she captures the times in ways that no other writer has, and, it could be argued, paved the way for more recent efforts such as Teju Cole’s Open City and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. And yet Adler’s novels were out of print for too many years.
In 2010, the National Book Critics Circle asked its membership, along with other former winners and finalists, which work of fiction or nonfiction they would most like to see republished, and the title mentioned most often—by far—was Adler’s Speedboat. That same year, in David Shields’s Reality Bites: A Manifesto, which is described on the jacket flap as “a call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century,” he champions Speedboat, writing that it “tantalizes by being simultaneously daring and elusive. The book builds: images recur, ideas are interwoven, names reappear. Paragraphs are miniature stories. She’s always present, teasing things apart, but not from a distance. There’s very little that’s abstract.”
Adler has a reputation for taking no prisoners. In 2000, she published the excoriation Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker. The title says it all. In a New York Times Magazine piece written around the release of Gone, titled, “Renata Adler is Making Enemies Again,” several of her friends were called for comment. Elizabeth Hardwick laughed uproariously and said, “Honey, I’m not going to go near that.” And Joan Didion sighed that she was having fifty people to dinner the next night and then going out of town and would be quite unreachable.
I love and admire and am excited by both Speedboat and Pitch Dark, but I have a soft spot for the latter novel. Here are three characteristic Adler sentences from Pitch Dark:
“Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?”
“She had loved him, you know, with the operatic intensity of a basset, or a diva, or a child.”
“You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.”
The syntax and direct address of this last sentence directly inspired the writing of my essay “White Space,” which, in turn, helped me through a very specific period of grief; “White Space” was published last year in The Los Angeles Review.
Here is Adler in the photograph Richard Avedon took in 1983 for the book jacket of Pitch Dark.
And here’s Adler in 2013, signing copies of her two novels for me, courtesy of my friend and former Naslund-Mann student Rosanna Staffa.
The good news I want to close with is this: The New York Review of Books Classics series republished Speedboat and Pitch Dark in 2013, and both books remain in print in 2026.
The bad news? I’m still waiting for that third novel.
While I realize that Renata Adler’s novels may not be for everyone, they are instructive and inspiring, and I can say without a doubt that my life as a fiction writer and as a reader would have been much less rich without them, and in this I am clearly not alone.
Robin Lippincott is the author of Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell and five other books. He has been teaching in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing since 2001.