Adler, Renata

Renata Adler, (born October 19, 1938, Milan, Italy), Italian-born American journalist, experimental novelist, and film critic best known for her analytic essays and reviews for The New Yorker magazine and for her 1986 book that investigates the news media.

Adler was educated at Bryn Mawr (Pennsylvania) College, the Sorbonne, and Harvard University. From 1962 to 1968 and from 1970 to 1982, she was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. Essays and reviews she wrote there are collected and published as Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism (1969). From her controversial single-year tenure as film critic for The New York Times came a collection of reviews published as A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic, 1968–69 (1970). She occasionally wrote essays for other publications as well, and in 1980 she garnered much attention for a scathing assessment of a collection by film critic Pauline Kael. The piece, which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, notably stated that Kael’s reviews were “line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Adler later turned to writing short stories, some of them published under the pseudonym Brett Daniels in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other periodicals.

In 1974 Adler won first prize in the O. Henry short-story awards competition. Adler reworked previously published short fiction into Speedboat (1976), her first novel, for which she won the Ernest Hemingway Prize (1976) for best first novel. Set primarily in New York City, Speedboat consists mainly of a series of disparate sketches and vignettes of impressions, musings, and slices of life, all distilled through the ironic and often detached sensibility of the protagonist Jen Fain. Like Speedboat, Adler’s second novel, Pitch Dark (1983), is episodic and nonlinear; critical response to both was mixed.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Adler also wrote the nonfiction work Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time (1986), an investigation into libel suits brought by American and Israeli generals against major American news organizations. She also published Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Decision That Made George W. Bush President (2004) and several collections of essays, including Politics and Media (1988), Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001), and After the Tall Timber (2015).