Pitch Dark by Renata Adler with Joao Pato Kite Duck Rose

It seems to me that gossip can have two functions: To warn and to entertain. Renata Adler’s fiction does both; it gets at the “teeth of the question: is this altogether true?” She tells us: the world is not alright, but through a series of entertaining fragments we are able to piece together a story from the narrator’s observations, as filtered through our own. It’s a story told aslant, without clear hierarchy or readily apparent moralization, the way gossip is often delivered. Like much gossip, or perhaps gossipers, Adler’s form of relaying the story turns inward: the narrator is not held apart from their own assessments, and in making them she exposes her own complicity— intentionally or not. But unlike other gossip, Adler’s stories are not off the cuff: they are precisely rendered. What may at first seem tangential, a leap, like a puddle that diverges us from taking the straighter, more well-trodden path, is in fact a form of story telling, or perhaps construction, that takes full