‘There are only so many plots,’ writes Renata Adler in Speedboat, ‘There are insights, prose flights, rhythms, felicities. But only so many plots’.

What matters to me is voice. Reading is intimacy in the truest sense. When it comes to voice, I just know. I can tell from the first lines. The story of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, reprinted by the New York Review of Books after twenty-six years of dead air, is, along with its author, a remarkable story in itself. Adler was once as big as the movies but after a raucous career in journalism she was all but banished from the New York literary world, and over time her two works of fiction (Speedboat, Pitch Dark) became cult classics. Both books are postmodernist in style, structurally fragmented, and playful with language. Speedboat opens,