A center of action seemed to have broken down in us. In college, under Eisenhower, we were known for nothing, or for our apathy. Even now (and we are in our thirties), we have no journals we publish, no exile we share, no brawls, no anecdotes, no war, no solidarity, no mark.

I guess I am part of an age group that, through being skipped, through never having had a generational voice, was forced into the broadest possible America. But when the loss of Lee became such an important thing, I found that those two-and-a-half-year, open-ended narrative experiences define a lot of what I am and what I think, what I would like to write, what I think America, particularly a certain age and voice group, is, and what I think the American radical and intellectual communities are not. I had thought of my soap hours as a total waste of time, not a joke, not camp, not for a piece, not critically, a serious waste of time. Perhaps they are what personal life was like, before the violent, flash discontinuities of media news and personal air travel came along. I know of no more constant, undisjunct narrative than the soap operas.

It had a continuity stronger even than the news, where stories and characters submerge and reappear - or don’t - depending on where the limelight is. I saw the characters in them more often than my friends, knew their relationships, the towns. The soap operas ran along beside life five days out of seven. But it was not at all like losing a character in fiction of any other kind - not just an event in a two or ten hour imaginative experience, and then in memory. I suppose the script for Lee had run out, or that the actress had found another part. But when Lee Randolph died, a suicide who had lingered on for weeks, I watched her face being covered by a sheet, and I was ridden by the event for weeks. INTRODUCTIONįor two and a half years - until now, in fact - I watched Another World, The Doctors, Love of Life, Search for Tomorrow, Days of Our Lives, and later Hidden Faces (I have never cared for Secret Storm or Edge of Night) whenever I could, and nearly always when I thought I should be doing other things. WELL, I GUESS THAT’S ONE STATE WHERE THEY ELECT TO LOCK AND LOAD. And she writes extensively about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. In doing so, she unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss, the ones that explain what really is going on here - from the Watergate scandal, to the “preposterous” Kenneth Starr report submitted to the House during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, to the plagiarism and fabrication scandal of the former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. The more recent pieces are concerned with, in her words, “misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it.” With a brilliant literary and legal mind, Adler parses power by analyzing language: the language of courts, of journalists, of political figures, of the man on the street. This collection of Adler’s nonfiction draws on Toward a Radical Middle (a selection of her earliest New Yorker pieces), A Year in the Dark (her film reviews), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (a selection of essays on politics and media), and also includes uncollected work from the past two decades.

In this sense, Adler is one of the few independent journalists writing in America today. She has been unafraid to speak up when too many other writers have joined the pack. Like many journalists, she has put herself in harm’s way in order to give us the news, not the “news” we have become accustomed to - celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas - but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus. She has also written about cultural matters in the United States, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times), books, politics, television, and pop music. As a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1963 to 2001, Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War on the Nixon impeachment inquiry and Congress on cultural life in Cuba. In her essays and long-form journalism, she has captured the cultural zeitgeist, distrusted the accepted wisdom, and written stories that would otherwise go untold. What is really going on here? For decades Renata Adler has been asking and answering this question with unmatched urgency.

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