Speedboat by Renata Adler
Published 1976 · 48,950 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is Speedboat to read?
Speedboat scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Precise journalistic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Short, exact, self-contained sentences.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Concrete fragments arranged into an abstract impression.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Very dense per paragraph; nothing is connective tissue.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- A narrator who reports without ever explaining her position.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Little conventional symbolism; the method is juxtaposition.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- Sustained deadpan irony.
- Resolution withholding: 85 out of 100
- There is no plot to resolve and the book says so.
- Structural complexity: 88 out of 100
- Unconnected paragraphs with no narrative spine at all.
How Speedboat is regarded
Speedboat holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.