Renata Adler had already gained a reputation as a incendiary and controversial journalist in The New Yorker before publishing in 1976 her first and already mythical novel Speedboat, one of the American works of worship of the second half of the twentieth century. Jen Fain, the protagonist, is a young journalist with no goals, seemingly unable to establish a romantic link or pose a direct question, unable even to pick up the newspaper in the morning without finding a moral dilemma in the form of a fainting vagabond in the lobby, But, nevertheless, it manages to put in the point of view the subtleties of life. From the ashes of the libertarian and hippie dream of the sixties, the disorientation and the vertigo that in fast boat do not only function as the background of the novel (and the time), but become the very form of the narrative, a Narrative accelerated, nervous, discontinuous: lists, fragments, life vignettes, beckettian dialogues, electrical paragraphs, intermittencies that become inventories and collages of consciousness ... It is to a certain extent a song for convulsive times, a stressed polyphony built with the strategies of the Disc-jockey, a text that advanced several decades to the telegraphic writing and impatient that we see in Twitter, Facebook or the emails and that governs our times. Speedboat is a novel written not so much in terms of control or structural restraint as of association, tonality, suggestion: it puts into play a (with) fusion between the whole and the parts, between the literal and the figurative, seduction and threat , Cause and effect, and was a point of reference for writers like David Foster Wallace or Elizabeth Hardwick.