Pitch Dark

Description: ""What's new. What else. What next. What's happened here." Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow-up to her prizewinning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, a fraught relationship that reverberates throughout the novel, as it moves from Kate's house in rural Connecticut and her New York City brownstone apartment, to a small island off the coast of Washington, and to an utterly dark road in a remote corner of Ireland. Told in Adler's celebrated fragmented style, and constructed from the bare-bones language of everyday life, Pitch Dark transcends its parts to come to the kind of self-knowledge achievable only after a relentless quest"--

Review Quotes: "Two things hold Pitch Dark together and give it speed and magic. The first is Miss Adler's gift for language and observation . . . and the second is her willingness to write candidly, even rawly, about emotions." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"These novels are records of a penetrating intelligence, a skeptical intelligence (but, thank God, not a reflexively skeptical intelligence). They are novels that persuade you of their claims to truth, and ones in which any literate young person in publishing in New York can see a bit of her or himself [...] It's great to have these novels back in print, at long last." --Meghan O'Rourke, The New Yorker's Page-Turner Blog

"Adler's novels concede the necessity of making fiction quicker, more terse, descriptively less elaborate than the traditional thing called a novel, not so much in deference to shrunken attention spans, but as the most plausible way of rendering the distracted, fragmentary quality of contemporary consciousness [...] They describe what it's like to be living now, during this span of time, in our particular country and our particular world. This is what the best novels have always done, and with any luck will continue to do." --Gary Indiana, Bookforum

"Pitch Dark, like Speedboat, exudes a certain openness, a vulnerability, even. Adler dispenses with the defined paths of traditional narrative, along with expectations of order and sequence, and instead pieces together a collage of consciousness." --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review

"Renata Adler is brilliant, and her character Kate Ennis is lovable in her complete disinterest for making herself lovable. It's perfect and prescient, a tremendously influential book." --Chris Kraus, for Slate

"Imaginative, intelligent, and original." --Elizabeth Hardwick

"If you simply allow [Adler's fragments] to settle in their own patterns, flashing light where they will, you'll find Pitch Dark a bright kaleidoscope of a book." --Anne Tyler