Speedboat (24 page)

The threads held by the Fates, of course, were the puppet strings of mortal life. The Fates toyed with their protagonists, as novelists do, until they wearied of them and time came to cut the thread and pack them off to the well of souls.

“What is the point,” Jen says in
Speedboat
. The sentence is not a question. “That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind….Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.” Vigilant skepticism, a deep dubiety, is probably the strongest and certainly the most modern current of feeling in
Speedboat
: doubt, after all, is writing. The elegance, the enduring freshness of
Speedboat
is no mystery when you consider it a novel that not infrequently calls into question the moral of the story and, often enough, the story itself.

—G
UY TREBAY