Eat the Document: A Novel - Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta, whom Michiko Kakutani called "wonderfully observant and wonderfully gifted...with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadness of contemporary life" (The New York Times), has written a bold and moving novel about a fugitive radical from the 1970s who has lived in hiding for twenty-five years. Eat the Document is a hugely compelling story of activism, sacrifice, and the cost of living a secret.

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 each other 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 those choices in the 1990s, Dana Spiotta deftly explores the connection between the two eras -- their language, technology, music, and activism. Character-driven and brilliant, Eat the Document is an important and revelatory novel about the culture of rebellion, with particular resonance now.

PRAISE
"With only her second book Dana Spiotta has become, I think, a major American writer. The ironic connections she makes between the cultural divide of the early '70s and late '90s are chilling and delicious. This scary and often brilliant novel comes together beautifully in the end -- there's an intense satisfaction of seeing everything link up so movingly and with such warmth, and yet Spiotta is the only female writer I know whose prose reminds me of the cool ambient poetry and steely precision of Don DeLillo, and Eat the Document is as darkly exact and thrilling as the political novels of Joan Didion. "
– Bret Easton Ellis, author of Lunar Park

"I like the way Dana Spiotta tinges reality with a dazzling now-you-see-it, now-you-don't quality. She uses her prose like a strobe light to give you enough of a freeze-frame on what's happening to make you stop and wonder whether you might be implicated in this curious, perhaps dangerous dance. "
– Ann Beattie, author of Follies

"Such smart and delicious satire, yet so true and good to its characters too. More, please. "
– Stewart O'Nan, author of The Good Wife

"Like a set of Russian dolls nesting in each other, Spiotta's newest fiction finds the country in the family in a single human heart. Eat the Document -- but read it first. "
– Mark Costello, author of Big If

"Spiotta elucidates the vast gulf between the alternative cultures of the '70s and '90s, as well as the elements that bind them. Fiction as documentary, a coruscating, heartrending fable of struggle and loss. "
– Kirkus Reviews

". . . stunning . . . the staccato ferocity of a Joan Didion essay and the historical resonance and razzle-dazzle language of . . . Don DeLillo."
– Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Flashing back and forth across time and between generations, Spiotta creates a mesmerizing portrait of radicalism's decline."
– John Freeman, Seattle Times

". . . brilliant and haunting . . . grapples with modern history and . . . how the great decline of our society has picked up pace."
– New York Observer

"Fascinating . . . Spiotta's writing brims with such energy and intelligence."
– New York Times Book Review

". . . smart and beautiful . . . it brilliantly contrasts nascent and mature postmodernity through the lens of culture/counterculture."
– Portland Oregonian