Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism

by Renata Adler

Toward a Radical Middle includes essays on national & international social & political issues. Critics applauded the collection, noting that Renata Adler had skillfully chosen details to provide insight into many of the troubling issues of the 1960s & that she had managed to offer meaningful social commentary without intruding on her subject.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

285 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University.

Adler’s essays and articles have been collected in Toward a Radical Middle (1969) and A Year in the Dark (1970), Reckless Disregard (1986), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Renata Adler is also the author of two successful novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Both novels are composed of seemingly unconnected passages that challenge readers to find meaning. Like her nonfiction, Adler's novels examine the issues and mores of contemporary life.

In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.

Reviews

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 3 out of 5]

It will probably be impossible for whichever readers of TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE pick it up post-2019 to view it as anything but a book that covers almost the exact same terrain as SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM and THE WHITE ALBUM. And those who are startled by Goldwater-girl Didion's relative conservatism will be shocked out of their wokester unisex bib overalls by how reactionary Renata is. The love of Israel; the by-our-standards patronizing descriptions of the black caucus at a New Left meeting as "the most sensible" of the bunch; that gentle and genteel sneer of disdain on all that is not functional, upper-middle-class and productive which one finds in those early Didion essay collections...well, I hate to break it to you, kids, but that was the house tone in the New York Times and other organs of the well-educated bourgeoisie circa 1968. Those who grew up with the ingrained "at all moments in all ways be kind to [blacks/gays/women/disabled/trans/etc]" will feel as if they have just picked up a volume of Phyllis Schlafly.

Renata is a hanging judge. I knew that as a wee lad from her takedown of Pauline Kael, which, believe me, was even more shocking then than it is now. Her tone is prosecutorial. The hidden wish of her life is that she had been a Supreme Court justice--how she wishes to nail the accused. A curiously effective, but loathsome and patently unfair, technique of Adler's is to LIST phrases used by the accused. Stacked up in jackknifing piles of ""s, these words turn into a single bony finger pointed at the hapless witness. Adler's mode in almost all her non-fiction is to wheedle the judge into throwing the book at 'em. For all this, I find both her persona and her prose weirdly addictive; and the really queer codicil to the whole Affaire Adler is that her novels--SPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK--are as minor-key, weird, daring, wacky, good-humored, color-spritzed and sheerly delightful as her prosecutorial prose is NOT.

[ren · Rating 4 out of 5]

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