by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Catherine Lacey in the New York Times: “Speedboat” for Millennials?

Book reviewers, aware of the power of the copy-and-paste function to spread their work, make comparisons more elliptically than they once did.

Dwight Garner of the Times does, at any rate.  Reviewing Catherine Lacey’s first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, he considers it in the context of Renata Adler’s minor classic Speedboat.  But instead of comparing novel to novel, or author to author, he begins his review with an essay brève about the earlier novel, an aperçu peeled and sliced:

Renata Adler’s cult novel “Speedboat” (1976) was reissued last year and has caught on among a new generation of readers. It’s having a long, largely deserved moment. The best thing I’ve read about Ms. Adler’s novel came from Katie Roiphe, writing in Slate. She carefully tucked “Speedboat” alongside Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays” and Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights” as a sleek ’70s-era example of the “Smart Women Adrift” genre, narratives filled with “pretty yet melancholy vignettes of the state of being lost.” Ms. Adler condensed her theme in “Speedboat” this way: “I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”

He then goes on to review Nobody Is Ever Missing on its own terms, but in light of his insights about Speedboat. The only time he compares the new book to the earlier one, it’s to say this:

One salient thing about “Nobody Is Ever Missing” is that Elly, even at 28, is so much more girl than woman. The heroines of “Speedboat,” “Play It as It Lays” and “Sleepless Nights” would consume her like an oyster.

Artful juxtaposition of this kind is a reviewer’s way of avoiding the sort of obvious likening – say, “a Speedboat for pierced-and-dyed millennial Brooklyn” – that would be turned into a piece of marketing in a flash and would precede the book through the doors to the pitchrooms of Hollywood.

Of course, the copying and recopying of the best bits of reviews is nothing new.  The jacket of David Plante’s latest book – the first volume of his journals – carries comments, made about his early work, that it seems to me have been affixed to one book after another of his for thirty years.

Catherine Lacey was a student in several classes I taught in the graduate writing program at Columbia – she wrote a memorable short piece about Fitzgerald – and Nobody Is Ever Missing is getting outstanding reviews.  

Backlash to come.