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Summary
Summary
From "a major, unnervingly intelligent writer" (Joy Williams)..."rich, funny, learned, and tonally fresh" (Jeffrey Eugenides), comes a novel about aspiration, film, work, and love.
Dana Spiotta's new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the 80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common--except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone. Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.
Spiotta is "a wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today" ( The New York Times ). Innocents and Others is her greatest novel--wise, artful, and beautiful.
Author Notes
Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others ; Stone Arabia , A National Books Critics Circle Award finalist; and Eat the Document , a finalist for the National Book Award. Spiotta is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel is Wayward . She lives in Syracuse, New York.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Spiotta (Stone Arabia) tackles the slippery nature of identity and the destructive pull of desire in her fourth novel-this time through the lens of film. Having lived in Los Angeles since the 1980s, best friends Meadow and Carrie are both successful filmmakers, but their approach to art and life couldn't be more different. Married and strapped with a family, Carrie's films are breezy crowd-pleasers, while solo Meadow's searing documentaries pick at the scabs of their subjects' shortcomings. One of Meadow's early films tracks an outcast boy's disastrous experimentation with sex. Another of her "heavy, invisible, unremarkable" subjects is 41-year-old Jelly, aka Nicole-whose sad but captivating backstory Spiotta explores over the course of sporadic chapters-seduces Hollywood men over the phone but self-consciously vanishes when they ask to meet in person. As the book progresses, both women's lives spiral downward-Carrie's home life is hollow, Meadow's self-destructive narcissism ends her career-leaving neither fulfilled. Eschewing linear storytelling in favor of chapters interspersed with scene and interview transcripts and paragraphs of film theory, Spiotta delivers a patchwork portrait of two women on the verge of two very different nervous breakdowns. True to form, the effect is like watching raw footage before it's been edited-sometimes moving, often disjointed, always thought provoking. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Cinematic scenes of seduction and confession jostle with film analysis in this fresh approach to the novel We're always keen to get a handle on a novel. We like to sum it up, describe what it's like. And we like the title to do that job for us as well, so there are a lot of concrete nouns on the covers of novels, a lot of names or places; themes and ideas come attached, for the most part, to the security of the definite article. What do we make of a title such as Innocents and Others? As a description it couldn't be more abstract, those two words yoked together, one undoing the other, somehow. Yet it's for these reasons and more that Dana Spiotta's latest fictional adventure is so compelling. It's as though, by not ever quite knowing what this book is about, we are drawn further and further into its complicated and fabulously intelligent interior. Full of film references and critiques, essays and lists, Innocents and Others puts information and theory in the place where in other novels a "character" might reside. It opens with a young woman's account of her affair with a much older man, a famous Hollywood actor, huge and charismatic, with a big, deep laugh and a love of cigars. We assume this is Orson Welles. But as the story splits off into accounts of "me watching my boyfriend's most famous film", a high school project that consists of reports of 20 consecutive viewings of a classic movie, it's clear that this is no coming-of-age confessional enclosed in a roman a clef. The young girl is Meadow Mori, a glamorous, precocious teenager who becomes friends with a more ordinary classmate called Carrie Wexler. Part of Innocents and Others is about the progression of friendship between these two, and the shared love of cinema that means they will end up making films themselves. Meadow creates rigorous, reflexive and psychologically terrifying documentaries rooted in her own experience; and Carrie shoots chickflick blockbusters with a feminist twist that make her a fortune yet leave her feeling needy. The account of this relationship, comprising a series of self-contained short stories, along with an article Carrie writes as a mature film-maker about Meadow's work, is fully satisfying -- but by no means the only story here. Innocents and Others is also about looking, seeing, paying attention, asking ourselves if we can ever know the full story, ever really understand what makes a person tick. Rather than embodying the traditional idea of the novel as a character portrait, it's more as if the page we are reading is a sort of film in itself, flickering before us in a sequence of events and images and ideas. Spiotta seems to be saying, how could we possibly see it all? How can we depict life, truth, in a novel? All we can do is look and listen. After shooting some interviews, Meadow realises that "looking directly into the lens of a camera felt unnatural to some people. They needed a face. If she stood next to the camera, they seemed to look shiftily off to the side. Her solution came from Tokyo Story, the Yasujiro Ozu film ... in which he filmed his actors from a low angle, looking up from a fixed camera. This gave the approximate illusion of a direct gaze... Meadow used a tiny crew, including Kyle who had begun as her assistant and then almost immediately became her boyfriend ... When Kyle smiled or laughed, Meadow always felt distracted by his sudden flash of straight white teeth and she wanted to make him laugh even more." So we pay attention -- and so we also learn. Yes, Meadow and Carrie are growing up throughout the book; one in a black turtleneck making films about her boyfriend getting drunk, the other chain-watching sitcoms during sunny afternoons so she can figure out what makes them successful. But that happens alongside long discursive discussions about the nature of film, bullet-point lists of film buff facts, and analyses of various takes, stills and, as in the passage above, camera angles. And if that sounds dull, it shouldn't, because every sentence is full of information and verve, jumping with thoughtfulness and precision and, like that flash of white teeth, the unexpected. We have to read... hard. Spiotta thanks Don DeLillo in her acknowledgments, and her writing echoes his intense, idiosyncratic syntax and particular kind of abtruse thoughtfulness. In the midst of Meadow and Carrie's story, there is another, involving a weird kind of love triangle, about an overweight housebound woman called Jelly who cold calls famous Hollywood producers and pretends she knows them. As she seduces her producer down the line, he falls in love with the woman she would love to be: the tanned, blonde, leggy Nicole. "She didn't think of these as lies," Spiotta writes of Jelly's inventions. The men she calls "assumed things, she just didn't correct them. And she did feel like a graduate student... She felt that way, just as she felt blonde and supple and young when she talked to Jack. Here is what she did not feel: she did not feel dowdy and heavy. She did not feel the doughy curve of her large stomach... that the flesh of her thighs grew into her knees... " This, too, is compelling -- an obsessional affair, sexual and dark and misleading as any relationship, consisting of nothing but words. The two stories eventually meet when Meadow tracks Jelly down and films her weeping confession, voice and point of view merging with the camera's relentless gaze. In we go, and further in; there is no end, it seems, to all these stories and ways of telling them. At the close of the novel, another character finds her place in the pages -- an imprisoned young woman whom Meadow is interested in filming. We see her with her eyes closed in prayer, reliving every second of the night she let her baby burn to death. It's as cinematic and psychologically concentrated a scene as any other in this sophisticated literary construct of a book that has us unpacking meaning as fast as we turn the pages. Bringing a character in so late to the story is proof that Spiotta doesn't care about so many of the things other novelists care about. She only cares about pursuing her own wonderful project, making writing that resists easy depiction at every turn. - Kirsty Gunn.
Kirkus Review
The complex relationship among three women and the film world drives this tale of technology and its discontents. Much like Spiotta's previous novel, Stone Arabia (2011), this book is anchored by a fringe artist: Meadow built her career on experimental, Errol Morris-esque documentaries on tough subjects like the Kent State shootings and the Argentine Dirty War. That work brought her controversy but also acclaim and the freedom to write her own ticket creatively. So why, as the story opens, is she spinning a tale on a film blog about how she spent a year after high school as a consort to an aging Orson Welles? The answer isn't plain or immediate, but Spiotta, master of austere indirection, introduces a pair of additional characters who hint at an answer. One is Jelly, a woman who for years insinuated herself into the lives of Hollywood producer types, cold-calling them with no ambition beyond building a friendship over the phone. (She calls it a " 'pure' call experience.") The other is Meadow's childhood friend Carrie, who for years gamely indulged Meadow's avant-garde film geekery before pursuing a career creating more mainstream, crowd-pleasing fare. Which of them has followed the most authentic artistic path, and how much does her chosen media facilitate or stand in her way? In Meadow, Spiotta has imagined an emotionally robust character who struggles with these questions at turns with humor (as when she films a boyfriend getting drunk for a Warhol-esque essay film), empathy (as when Jelly becomes her subject), or, later, tragic pathos when she discovers the crushing extreme of what her dispassionate film style can uncover. Early on, she feels "her camera was a magic machine that made people reveal themselves whether they liked it or not." There's some darkness to that magic, Spiotta argues, but she also finds something miraculous in how technology can reveal us to ourselves. It's as true of this novel as of Meadow's oeuvre. A superb, spiky exploration of artistic motivation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Well-to-do, arty Meadow and middle-class, low-key Carrie meet as schoolmates in Los Angeles and bond over their passion for film, then follow divergent paths. In the era of CDs and phone phreaking (an early form of hacking), Meadow, a purist enthralled by documentaries, uses old equipment to get the right look and ambiance as she pursues stories of devastating impact, ranging from Argentina's Dirty War to a mysterious woman who seduced Hollywood insiders over the phone, only to cut them off when they asked to meet her in person. Austere and solitary, Meadow is all-but-worshiped for her rigorous and unflinching films until she is suddenly reviled for her alleged fascination with monsters. Carrie, a mother and wife, makes popular, covertly subversive women-focused comedies. National Book Award finalist Spiotta (Stone Arabia, 2011) brings to new levels of feverish intensity her signature dissection of obsession, the trends and ironies of the zeitgeist, how we document our lives, and the consequences of resistance to social imperatives in this ensnaring, sly, and fiercely intelligent novel, from which readers can extract a cineaste's dream watch list. A novel for readers thrilled by Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt, Rachel Kushner, and Claire Messud, Spiotta's deeply inquiring tale is about looking and listening, freedom and obligation, our dire hunger for illusion, and our profound need for friendship.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE LITERATURE OF friendship, like friendship itself, tends to unfold episodically - with none of the narrative determination of the Marriage Plot, in which young women accrue interest like a mutual fund until they mature into the expected climax: not orgasm but matrimony. There is no such thing as the Friendship Plot, because while friendship, like marriage, is at least presumably a voluntary estate, it has no official consummation, no church-or state-sanctioned vows. It would seem, then, that the literary form most suited to its pick-up-where-we-left-off, drop-me-when-you-couple-up-and-have-kids ebb and flow might be the story cycle, or serial tale - just ask Quixote and Sancho, or Huck and Tom, or the four dudes of "The Three Musketeers." Which explains why friendship is also so fitting a subject for the contemporary novel: The relationship between two people who might see each other only occasionally, yet who've shared determinative experiences and maybe even incriminating intimacies - could there be any affinity more situational or contextual, more... postmodern? Dana Spiotta has now spent four novels proposing and revising her own definitions of friendship. "Lightning Field" (2001) centered on the rivalrous affection between an ambitious restaurateur and her friend/employee; "Eat the Document" (2006) on the bond between fugitive Vietnam-era radicals; "Stone Arabia" (2011) concerned filial friendship, specifically that between a single-mother sister and the brother who relies on her to be the sole audience for his music and visual art. Now comes "Innocents and Others," a brilliant, riddling clip-montage of the friendship between two very different filmmakers. Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler grow up together in Los Angeles, Meadow rich and Carrie middle-class, which in Hollywood registers as poor. They go east together to study film at N.Y.U. and begin to drift apart. Carrie becomes a prominent director of mainstream women's comedies ("Girl School," "WACs," "We Are the Ones Our Parents Warned Us About," "A Baby!"), while Meadow sweats out documentaries, festival-circuit darlings devoted to exorcising the traumas of people who've abused their power. "Kent State: Recovered" probes whether the F.B.I. provoked National Guardsmen into shooting students; "Play Truman" intercuts excerpts from Truman's diary, in which the president grappled with the A-bomb, with footage from Japanese home movies of the 1940s; "Children of the Disappeared" collects interviews with perpetrators of the Argentine junta's Dirty War. Then there's "Inward Operator" - a documentary that drifts into the novel like an overheard conversation. Its subject is an overweight telemarketer from Syracuse named Amy who sometimes refers to herself as Nicole and sometimes as Jelly; she has a blind boyfriend named Oz (as in the Great), a Rolodex of the phone numbers of peripheral Hollywood types filched from a friend who cleans their homes and, most saliently, a telephone addiction. Jelly, already an expert on the varieties of male vanity, takes to studying Variety and ringing up sundry screenwriters and set- and costume-designers, apologizing for misdialing them, but then claiming mutual acquaintance. The prank nature of her importuning is softened by the ego-stroke, and soon Jelly becomes their muse, their long-distance telephonamorata: "Jelly had a different purpose in listening to anything or anyone. It had something to do with submission, and it had something to do with sympathy. She would lie back and cut off all distraction. The phone was built for this. It had no visual component, no tactile component, no person with hopeful or embarrassed face to read, no scent wafting, no acid collection in the mouth. Just vibrations, long and short waves, and to clutch at them with your own thoughts was just wrong. A distinct resistance to potential. A lack of love, really. Because what is love, if not listening, as uninflected - as uncontained - as possible." This listening lark acquires a more emotionally consequential tone once Jelly connects with Jack, a divorced father and film composer who enjoys performing his latest cues for her, handset balanced by the keyboard. After myriad sessions of a purely vocal courtship (no "texted" photos - this is the 1990s), Jack says the L-word and buys her a first-class ticket to Los Angeles. Jelly, however, has lied to him about nearly everything - not least her appearance - so she stands him up and hangs up her receiver: She'll never talk to another movie man again. The Jelly-Jack reel and the Meadow-Carrie reel finally synch up when "Inward Operator" premieres. Jelly, predictably, is appalled and declares herself used, but what can't be predicted is how the intensity of her reaction conditions her director's. Spiotta bleeds this situation for all of its nuance, raising provocative questions about art and commerce and the ethics of creation. By staging the misery of strangers, is Meadow guilty of betrayal? Might she, even, be guilty of self-betrayal - her catfishing of Jelly's catfishing ultimately shallower and more exploitative than the blockbuster bait of Carrie's slapstick? Spiotta's dramatization of the Meadow-Carrie dyad is masterly, with lines (in third-person authorial voiceover, and in first person in the voices of both Meadow and Carrie) that seem delivered - improvised - by women who've known each other and even the reader forever: deeply encoded, privately referential and pregnant with pander, indulgence and resentment: "Was it fair or good or right to count on - even consider - an assumption of memory? But isn't that what all film counted on, a kind of shared memory of everything we have seen in the movies?" SUCH IS THE subtlety of Spiotta's prose, and the diversity of its presentation (the book includes biographical essays, video transcripts, diary entries, online chats), that the reader can never be sure which, if any, meaning is intended as primary. Are we meant to discern a de constructive critique, or merely a mockery of chick lit, in Spiotta's portrayal of two smart female artists trying to honor their pasts while inventing their futures, all without judging each other to death? Or are we reading a philosophical novel, one that enacts the immemorial debate between art as entertainment (Carrie's filmography) and art for art's sake (Meadow's)? For that matter, is all the discussion about the disparities between the women's genres just a proxy for the literary antagonism between the novel and the memoir? Is Carrie's willingness to churn out lowbrow lounge-around-in-your-sweatsuit Netflix fodder supposed to be understood as socioeconomically inevitable, and therefore forgivable, given its rewards in fame and residuals? Or is Meadow's willingness to sacrifice mainstream success in favor of recording the (ostensible) facts of human suffering and earning arthouse respect supposed to be read as a moral choice, and not as a venal act of appropriation and narcissism? Spiotta's precision pacing keeps all of these questions and more in the frame, and keeps them fundamentally unanswerable by linking them to such real-life obsessions as sex, attractiveness, childbearing, child-rearing and money. Ironically, the product of all this single-author sleight-of-hand reads like a shockingly smooth collaboration, as if Meadow and Carrie - who, with their opposing aesthetic approaches, could never have completed a film together - have somehow joined forces in a novel, the only art form capacious enough yet interior enough to contain them. "Innocents and Others" is a combo-deal of a novel that mixes the silliness of a popcorn romp with the intellectual seriousness of a one-camera talking-head commentary. Highbrow and lowbrow have cohabitated before, of course, but rarely with this ease or this empathy. Spiotta - like Didion, DeLillo, Nicholson Baker and Bret Easton Ellis - understands that the interaction between her art form and the popular isn't an agony but an amity: a peopled life. By staging the misery of strangers, is a filmmaker guilty of betrayal? JOSHUA COHEN'S most recent novel, "Book of Numbers," was published last year.
Library Journal Review
Raised in Los Angeles and best friends since eighth grade, Meadow and Carrie are inspired by their film teacher to pursue directing careers after their 1985 high school graduation. Whippet-thin Meadow obsesses over lost film footage and a desire to decode the secrets of the great filmmakers, particularly Orson Welles. Intelligent, talented, moneyed, and more than a little pretentious, she creates her own brand of critically successful documentary films showcasing "raw human drama." A softer, kinder -Carrie, tutored by Meadow in classic cinema but raised on formulaic TV sitcoms, finds commercial success as a director of popular multiplex comedies. Meanwhile, dumpy, visually challenged Jelly, a middle-aged lover of movies, insinuates herself into the world of those who create it. She is first introduced to anonymous calling by her boyfriend, a 1970s "phone phreaker" who hacks the landline system, and through luck and canny research eventually becomes "Nicole," phone-only confidante and love interest of Jack, a renowned film composer. Through these characters, Spiotta (Stone Arabia) reveals that like cinema itself, all relationships depend upon a measure of illusion. Verdict Spiotta does a masterly job of getting under the skin of disparate characters, revealing the kinds of insecurities that plague us all, successful or not. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/15.]-Paula Gallagher, Baltimore Cty. P.L. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
