Salon.com > Kelsey Osgood

Rediscovering Renata Adler

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:00:00 +0000

In the past few weeks, there have been quite a number of pieces published on the two novels of Renata Adler, which were reissued this week by The New York Review of Books. Nearly all of them contain a reference to the infamously negative review Adler wrote of her former New Yorker colleague Pauline Kael’s book of collected film criticism. Usually the reviewer quotes one particularly damning line from Adler’s 8,000-word excoriation of Kael’s book, but really, the whole thing is a masterwork of literary analysis. In the beginning of the piece, Adler demonstrates her great talent for deflating an idea by giving us a nutshell description of the critic’s job:

What [the critics] provide is a necessary consumer service, which consists
essentially of three parts: a notice that the work exists, and where it can be
bought, found, or attended; a set of adjectives appearing to set forth an
opinion of some sort, but amounting really to a yes vote or a no vote; and a
somewhat nonjudgmental, factual description or account, which is usually
inferior by any journalistic standard to reporting in all other sections of the
paper.

Ingmar Bergman, novelist

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:00:00 +0000

A personal anecdote, if you’ll permit me: during one point in my college years, I was deemed angst-ridden enough to warrant not only twice-a-week therapy sessions, but also attendance at a weekly group for people similarly angst-ridden. It was during this period—and this is certainly unfortunate timing—that I watched Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, the haunting tale of a cheerful nurse, played by Bibi Andersson, and her selectively mute ward, played by Liv Ullman, whose personalities begin to blend together in sinister, mysterious ways. I was just as captivated by the stark cinematography of Bergman’s longtime collaborator, Sven Nykvist, as I was by the existential struggle of Ullman’s character, an actress who has lost her luster for role-playing on stage and in life. It seemed as if a speech delivered by a psychiatrist early in the film (which contains such maudlin gems as “The hopeless dream of being—not seeming, but being”) was somehow meant just for me. I regaled the other group members with the lessons I had learned from watching the movie, using Bergman’s bleak rationales as a counter-argument to the group therapist’s insistence that we all try to lead happier, more productive lives. A few days later, my individual psychologist told me that the group therapist had called her because she was “concerned” about me.

Mr. Joan Didion

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Joan Didion. The name alone conjures up an ocean of descriptive phrases in which one could drown. Here is but a small helping: In Salon, Kyle Minor called her “the most consistently interesting and quotable essayist in the English language.” InIntelligent Life magazine, Robert Butler echoes that sentiment, labeling her first-person voice “cool” and “incisive.” “The writer who expressed most eloquently the eternal-girl impulse,” Caitlin Flanagan recently dubbed Didion in The Atlantic. A visit to the Amazon page of but one of her fourteen books yields “taut, clear-eyed,” “extraordinarily poignant,” “achingly beautiful,” and, about the book peddled at this particular URL, “a remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief.”

But goodbye to all that, for now.