Innocents and Others
Dana Spiotta, 2016
Scribner
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501122729
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 16, 1966
• Where—state of New Jersey, USA
• Raised—Los Angeles, California
• Education—Evergreen State College
• Awards—finalist, National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Syracuse, New York
Dana Spiotta is the author of several novels: Innocents and Others (2016); Stone Arabia (2011), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document (2006), a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Spiotta was born in New Jersey, moving to and from various suburbs until her family settled in Los Angeles when she was 13. The city, especially its film industry, impressed itself on her and later became the setting, even the subject, of her novels.
She attended Columbia University for two years but dropped out during the chaotic period of her parents' divorce. To support herself, she headed to Seattle, Oregon, eventually enrolling at Evergreen State College where she studied labor history and creative writing.
On a whim almost, she and a friend cold-called a number in New York City—a number they found on the back of Quarterly, the literary journal. When its editor, the famed writer-editor Gordon Lish, happened to pick up the phone, the girls ended up being offered jobs as managing editors, and the two headed to New York. It was while working at Quarterly that Spiotta met Don DeLillo, who became both mentor and friend. (Years later, Spiotta was referred to as "DeLillo with a vagina," meant, it's utterer said, as a compliment.)
Her second novel Eat the Document (2006)—published while working at an upstate restaurant (which she and her then-husband owned)—brought her to the attention of writers and critics. She was offered a teaching position in the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University, where she remains today. Her colleagues include such notables as George Saunders and Mary Karr (who called her "whip smart and tirelessly generous").
Spiotta has been a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter and her second husband. (Adapted from Wikipedia and New York Times. Retrieved 3/10/2016.)
Book Reviews
Ambitious.... Innocents and Others aims not only to use its characters’ experiences to open a window on American life in the late 20th century, but also to examine how technology has atomized contemporary life and the ways art mediates our relationships with friends and strangers. ...[S]harp, kinetic.... Ms. Spiotta writes about film with great knowledge and insight.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
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 deconstructive 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)?
Joshua Cohen - New York Times Book Review
A brilliant split-screen view of women working within and without the world of Hollywood…. [I]lluminating….. Among chapters of conventional narration, Spiotta presents the transcript of an eight-hour interview...lists, descriptions of editing sessions, a filmography, online essays. Whatever the novel needs, it confidently shifts to embrace…its moral dimensions feel vast. Once Spiotta has her disparate storylines in motion, they resonate with each other in ways you can’t stop thinking about…. Spiotta explores the remarkable species of sisterhood that survives jealousy and disappointment and even years of neglect....nothing can blot out their shared history, their abiding devotion, the great wonder that is a true friend.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Enigmatic… fascinating… the need to connect, the desire for intimacy and friendship, and the quest for meaning in our lives are at the heart of this complex and compelling book… Spiotta is asking big, interesting, questions here. Without consciousness, without an inward operator, what are we connecting to? To art? To nature? To something divine?.... It is worth mentioning that in the structure of the novel, Spiotta is playing with time and narrative, jumping freely between story lines, to create a unique vibe that buzzes in your subconscious…. These dual (or triple) parallel threads intersect only briefly but with consequences that deliver a surprising wallop of emotion…. It's difficult not to descend into hyperbole talking about Spiotta's work. She writes with a breezy precision and genuine wit that put her on a short list of brilliant North American novelists who deserve a much wider audience…. And it's rare to find a novel that is so much fun and, at the same time, seeks emotional truth with such intellectual rigor; it adds up to an original and strangely moving book.
Mark Haskell Smith - Los Angeles Times
Haunting…[Meadow’s] story serves as the intellectual fulcrum of this intimate, unsettling novel, but Jelly provides its emotional heart.
Claudia Rowe - Seattle Times
A female critic may have been impolitic in calling Spiotta "DeLillo with a vagina"; more to the point, she’s DeLillo with a heart (or a stronger one, at least). Innocents and Others is both lean and capacious. Revolving around a documentary filmmaker, her rocky friendship with a more commercial director, and one of her subjects—a sympathetic con artist who catfishes powerful men over the phone—Innocents and Others uses both traditional narration and ‘found’ documents to build a sort of mixed-media meditation on alienation, friendship, technology, and the senses of hearing and sight.
Boris Kachka - New York Magazine
A thrillingly complex and emotionally astute novel about fame, power, and alienation steeped in a dark eroticism and a particularly American kind of loneliness.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
The visionary liberty and daring with which Dana Spiotta has crafted her brilliant new novel Innocents and Others is both inspirational and infectious. At its heart is a cinematic tale of friendship, obsession, morality, and creativity between best-friend filmmakers Carrie Wexler and Meadow Mori….over time, Meadow’s ‘penchant for failures, [her] soft spot for them’ and Carrie’s commercial success will test their bond to the max…original and seductive…with Innocents and Others, [Spiotta] delivers a tale about female friendship, the limits of love and work, and costs of claiming your right to celebrate your triumphs and own your mistakes.
Lisa Shea - Elle
Impossible to put down.
Steph Optiz - Marie Claire
Dana Spiotta’s whip-smart Innocents and Others maps the unexpected confluence of two rising feminist filmmakers and a movie buff who, posing as a film student, seduces Hollywood men over the phone, simply by listening to them.
Marnie Hanel - W
Brilliant…masterful…Recalling a younger, warmer DeLillo, Spiotta reminds us that the cinema is where America fears and desires have long been projected, the small-town theater an abandoned temple of shared dreams. At the same time, she nails a devastating irony: The more reachable we are, the more screens infiltrate our lives, the less there is that genuinely connects us.
Megan O’Grady - Vogue
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.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [E]nsnaring, sly, and fiercely intelligent.... 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. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
(Starred review.) The complex relationship among three women and the film world drives this tale of technology and its discontents.... [Spiotta] finds something miraculous in how technology can reveal us to ourselves.... A superb, spiky exploration of artistic motivation.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available. In the meantime use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Innocents and Others...then take off on your own:
1. "This is a love story," reads the opening line of Innocents and Others. How does that line apply to the novel as a whole? What is meant by the term "love"? Does it refer to intimacy or friendship or obsession...or something else?
2. The book opens with Meadow, one of the main characters, lying about an affair with Orson Welles. Why does Meadow fabricate the relationship? And why might Dana Spiotta have chosen to open her novel with a lie?
3. Talk about Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler. How are they different from one another? Consider their childhood backgrounds, as well as the choices they made in their personal and professional lives.
4. Follow-up to Question 3: Discuss the long-term friendship at the heart of the novel. How do Carrie's and Meadow's career paths strain their relationhip? What continues to bind them together?
5. Consider Meadow's reaction when she sees Carrie's new film—the "funniest film of the summer." After seeing it, Meadow wonders, "What was wrong with her? Why was she like this, so ungenerous?" Is Meadow normally "ungenerous"? She also wonders, "Why couldn't she be better?" Have you ever had similar concerns about how you react to friends' successes (or failures...schadenfreud, anyone)? Is resentment or jealousy part of human nature?
6. One of the concerns of the novel has to do with artistic integrity. Whose career path is more authentic...and whose is less? Is Carrie a sellout because her films appeal to popular audiences? Or in an industry—and a society—that rewards escapism, is Carrie's choice inevitable, even blameless? Has Meadow remained true to her goals? Or is she following her own egotistical drive for acclaim among the art house crowd?
7. Is Meadow's film "Inward Operator" a betrayal of Jelly, or even a betrayal of her own standards?
8. Talk about the hollowness at the heart of the lives of the three women in this novel: Carrie, Meadow, and Jelly. Why are their lives not more fulfilling?
9. What about Jelly, who finds intimacy through her "pure calls"? Jelly says, "I was always happy to reach an inward operator." What is an "inward operator"—and who else might be searching for one in this novel?
10. Meadow believes that people reveal themselves in front of a camera whether they intend to or not. Do you believe cameras have a revelatory quality to them? Can we come to know others, even ourselves, through the lens of a camera? If so, how does that happen? When you see yourself on video, or hear your voice on tape, have you ever been surprised at how you look and sound?
11. Dana Spiotta avoids straight forward, linear story telling; instead, she intersperses her narrative with interviews, scene transcripts, webpages, film theory dissertations, and more. What affect does this have on your reading of the book? Why might the author have chosen this interruptive mode?
12. This book is concerned about the impact of art on human consciousness. What is art's purpose or intent? Is it to entertain? Is it to enable us to see what we often overlook—about the world, about ourselves? What are your thoughts on how art affects us? When we view art (an image, say, on film or otherwise), what are we connecting with—art itself, nature, ourselves, or something transcendant and divine ?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)