After the Tall Timber

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RENATA ADLER has become something of a cult figure for a new generation of literary-minded young women since the 2013 re-release of her novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Those books represent an early point, and in many ways a high point, in the portrayal of a modern sort of angst — vulnerable women adrift in both the psychological and actual world. Adler herself can often seem like an iconic figure of fragility and lostness with her long bouts of literary absence and silence.

Here, however, in this collection of her most significant journalism, she is a diametrically opposite figure: a fierce and aggressive writer, known and feared and sometimes shunned for turning her stone-cold and contrarian judgments on her own professional class. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that her writing is some of the most brutal ever directed at journalism itself.

Shortly before the publication of Gone, her broadside against The New Yorker and what the magazine became after it was sold in 1985 by its original owners, I was at a cocktail party on Manhattan’s West Side at the home of a New York Times cultural supremo attended by a set of publishing myrmidons of frightening standing and lockstep opinions. Following the whispered name “Renata,” I literally intruded on a clucking circle of these reproachful men planning their counterattacks against her: something must be done.

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