of Speculation,” owes a huge debt to these two pioneering novels, and to their classic precursor, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Rilke’s 1910 novel, which was structured as a kind of journal. Elizabeth Hardwick’s “ Sleepless Nights,” whose narrator bore more than a passing resemblance to the author, mapped the contours of her life by putting memories, aphorisms and observations on shuffle. Renata Adler’s “ Speedboat,” narrated by a woman who worked at a tabloid newspaper, jump-cut among vignettes from her life to capture the incongruities of her experience and the larger incongruities of American life in the ’60s and ’70s. Two innovative books published in the 1970s used fragmentation and discontinuity to create kaleidoscopic portraits of their heroines’ lives.
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