Description

‘Perfect and prescient. A tremendously influential book’ CHRIS KRAUS
‘Plangent, mournful, brilliant’ ARTFORUM
‘A bright kaleidoscope of a book’ ANNE TYLER

Pitch Dark is a book about love.

Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland.

Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.

A W&N Essential with an introduction by Muriel Spark

Publisher Review

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 *