An Amazon Best Book of March 2016: Typically brainy and
surprisingly warm, Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others is the
story of two best friends, filmmakers both, who have very
different ideas about everything from movies to morality. Jelly
is a third woman, more obviously messed up but probably, weirdly,
as powerful in a certain world; she cold-calls important men and
emotionally seduces them with her “active listening.” How these
three women collide is the plot here. But how it is that all of
our devices--technological and otherwise-- meant to help us
communicate really do the site is the subtext. In that
way--and for its clear, frank prose--Innocents and Others
reminded me of Jennifer Egan’s Visit to the Goon Squad; like that
novel, this one will get under your skin. --Sara Nelson
Guest Review by Jenny Offill
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Jenny Offill Photo Credit: Emily Tobey
Dana Spiotta Photo Credit: Jessica Marx
"Thousands of short stories and novels have been made into
movies,” Don Delillo said once. “I just try to reverse the
process."
But what would such a hybrid look like? Is it possible to
combine the sweeping vistas of an epic film with the minute
psychological detail of a realist novel? Yes, it turns out. In
her brilliantly cinematic new novel, Innocents and Others, Dana
Spiotta shows us exactly how it is done.
On the surface, it is the story of two female filmmakers,
long-time friends who share memories and a sense of ambition, but
end up with very different careers. Meadow Mori makes complex,
emotionally disturbing documentaries, many of which blur the line
between her subjects’ active participation and their unwitting
coercion. She lives the life of an experimental artist, always
pushing herself to the edges of what she knows and sometimes
further. Her childhood friend, Carrie Wexler, takes a less
radical, more commercial route. Over the years, their friendship
is strained by their aesthetic differences and they start to
drift apart.
But this is only one piece of a much larger story Spiotta is
telling about love and loneliness and the search for solace and
meaning in an increasingly fragmented world. She perfectly
illuminates the cultural and technological obsessions of the era,
bringing to the surface an uncanny mix of free-floating dread and
creeping alienation that feels very modern.
The novel also moves out beyond the lives of Meadow and Carrie
and lets us into stories of two other women who live far from
their privileged worlds. Meadow makes a film about Jelly, a
telephone con artist who convinces Hollywood men to give her not
money, but a sort of disembodied love. Later, Meadow talks Carrie
into collaborating with her to make a film about another lost
soul, Sarah Mills, who has been imprisoned because of a terrible
crime she confessed to in her youth. There is a mystery and
radiance to these crisscrossing storylines that deepens and
complicates all that has come before. Neither film projects turns
out as planned, but the excitement of these sections is that we
get to experience the same rollercoaster of emotions that the
filmmakers and their audiences do as we watch the process from
idea to execution. Spiotta ingeniously uses a mix of transcripts,
texts, blog posts and interviews to make Meadow and Carrie’s
struggle to make good art and ultimately to live good lives,
thrillingly complicated and real.
I came away from this bold and generous novel thinking a great
deal about innocence and guilt and those small moments of
redemption that allow us to live with our miscalculations and
mistakes.