Eat the Document: A Novel

by Dana Spiotta (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $5.49

  Eat the Document is a compelling story of activism, sacrifice and the cost of living a secret. It tells the story of two lovers, passionately committed 1970s anti-war protestors who, as a consequence of choices made back then, have had to erase their pasts, forge new identities and never see each other again. Dana Spiotta illuminates the buried connections between past and present - language, music, technology and activism - with coolness and precision, creating a multi-faceted portrait of three decades in America.

  `A mesmerising journey: from bomber to motherhood, from American subversive to middle-aged widow . . . Dana Spiotta runs the narrative intrigue with assurance, linking the youth-culture disaffection of the 1970s drop-outs with the dissidence of the 1990s generation. The mental energy in this novel is absorbing. Spiotta expresses its diversity with such nuance that it makes you gasp' Scotland on Sunday

  `Perceptive and intelligent . . . cool, verbally smart and socially astute' Independent

  `Her prose has the calm, ghostly precision of a surgical needle . . . A dark, gripping quasi-thriller that, as it digs deep into America's post-war counterculture, challenges as much as it beguiles' Metro

  `A major American writer . . . the only female writer I know whose prose reminds me of the cool ambient poetry and steely precision of Don DeLillo . . . Eat the Document is as darkly exact and thrilling as the political novels of Joan Didion' Bret Easton Ellis

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $5.40

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $5.86

  In the heyday of the 1970s underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker - passionate, idealistic and in love - design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities and never see one another again.

  Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother's generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead.

  Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of choices made back then in the 1990s, Dana Spiotta deftly explores the connection between the two eras - their language, technology, music and activism. Eat the Document is an important and revelatory novel about the culture of rebellion.

  'Stunning . . . a glittering collage of a book - a book that possesses the staccato ferocity of a Joan Didion essay and the historical resonance and razzle-dazzle language of a Don DeLillo novel . . . a symphonic portrait of three decades of American life . . . filled with musical leitmotifs and searing, strobe-lighted images of contemporary life' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times