This thesis examines the two published novels of Renata Adler, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), exploring the relationship between Adler’s distinctive narrative style and the multifaceted negotiation of agency found in these works. Both novels are read as autofiction, and their metanarrative approach as a comment on both the impossibility of representation in fiction and the empowering potential of personal narrative. Adler’s employment of affective language, which is used to construct both the character-narrators of these novels and the social contexts at which they cast their critical eyes, is equally entwined with their depiction of power: a rejection of empathy and passionate emotionality becomes a way of projecting objectivity, while a thorough condemnation of the emotion observed in secondary characters is a vital part of the novels’ satirical project. Pieter Vermeulen’s notion of “affective austerity,” which is used to guide this investigation into two works of fiction written and published in the immediate aftermath of the 1975 New York fiscal crisis, informs my conception of austerity as a literary form, one dictated by the cultural dominance of austerity politics. Speedboat and Pitch Dark, in their commitment to narrative and affective withholding, position austerity as another empowering strategy, which promotes a kind of agency reliant on respectability—a quality easily lost through careless expression, especially when the one expressing herself is a woman. Lending a sense of urgency to all of these strategies – self-reflexive narration, affective “toughness,” and austere storytelling – is the novels’ insistence on their necessity, lest the narrators be left completely disempowered. Discussing the many ways in which a novel (or two) can engage with questions of agency, my thesis approaches a more nebulous problem, one I perceive as central to the field of postmodern literary studies: what, if anything, can a work of fiction really change?