Pitch Dark

Renata Adler’s new novel, like her previous work of fiction Speedboat, is a genre unto itself, a discontinuous first-person narrative. Adler’s mind is analytical and her style ebullient – Muriel Spark
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
Imaginative, intelligent and original – Elizabeth Hardwick
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 * Slate *
Two things hold Pitch Dark together and give it speed and magic. The first is Adler’s gift for language and observation - she seems capable of writing about anything with intelligence and wit; and the second is her willingness to write candidly, even rawly, about emotions – Michiko Kakutani * New York Times *
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 * New York Times Book Review *
Virtuosic … Pitch Dark is a marvel of metafiction * Sydney Review of Books *
These novels are records of a penetrating intelligence … These are not works of realism - they have a dreamlike quality - but they contain as much reality as a Balzac novel does. It’s just that their reality is incantatory, sparse, periodically blazing, and not a little self-consciously neurotic … It’s great to have these novels back in print, at long last – Meghan O’Rourke * New Yorker *

Renata Adler was born in Milan and raised in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. from Harvard, a D.d E.S from the Sorbonne, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.D. (honorary) from Georgetown. Adler became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1963 and, except for a year as the chief film critic of the New York Times, remained at the New Yorker for the next four decades. Her books include A YEAR IN THE DARK (1969); TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE (1970); RECKLESS DISREGARD: WESTMORELAND V. CBS ET AL., SHARON V. TIME (1986); CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT (2001); GONE: THE LAST DAYS OF THE NEW YORKER (1999); IRREPARABLE HARM: THE U.S. SUPREME COURT AND THE DECISION THAT MADE GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENT (2004); and the novels SPEEDBOAT (1976; winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel) and PITCH DARK (1983).

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