Eat the Document - Dana Spiotta
by Zia ~ June 5th, 2006. Filed under: Books.
I put Eat the Document on hold at the library after reading Lightning Field, and all I can say about Spiotta is that she is a master of catching the lives of those who seem to live on the periphery of normality. Hmm, I just reread that and it doesn’t seem like a compliment. It is, though.
Eat the Document juxtaposes the radical early 70s with the complacent oughts. Mary Whittaker and her boyfriend have just blown up a corporate executive’s summer house in protest, and it’s all gone horribly wrong . They both disappear. One storyline follows Mary through the years. The other focuses on the present, including Mary (now called Caroline) and her son Jason, who becomes increasingly curious about his mother’s past, and Nash (the boyfriend, though we’re not supposed to know that) who now runs a bookstore for a Vietnam vet friend. Ultimately, of course, the two storylines converge.
I think the greatest success of the novel is the slow exposition of Mary’s character; she changes just as her names do, and our perceptions of who she is shift as the novel progresses. The character of Jason–who sounded middle-aged, rather than a teenager–kind of bothered me, as did the sometimes rusty gearshiftings between past and present and one character to another. In addition, there were a lot of peripheral characters of Nash’s side of the story, which sometimes muddied the waters. But overall, I really liked this.