Innocents and Others: A Novel - Dana Spiotta

From “a major, unnervingly intelligent writer” (Joy Williams)…“rich, funny, learned, and tonally fresh” (Jeffrey Eugenides), comes 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.

PRAISE
"What a thrilling ride. And what a delight to be at the receiving end of so much virtuosic caring. A daring and beautiful meditation about selfishness and selflessness, and how to be in the world. A powerful book that will stay with me and continue to speak to me for a long time. Spiotta is a wonder."
– George Saunders, author of Tenth of December

“Dana Spiotta is one of my favorite living writers and inthis wondrous and mysterious novel, a spectacular and subtle meditation onsight and sound, she seems almost to channel Jean-Luc Godard: Innocents and Others, like classic JLG,is brilliant, and erotic, and pop.”
– Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba

“Dana Spiotta's new book is a literary marvel that employs the dominant medium of our time to rout out both the impulse to make worlds alternate to the one we occupy and the darkest spots in the human heart. As Don DeLillo did for rock and roll with Great Jones Street, so Spiotta does for film with Innocents and Others. Spiotta is emerging as perhaps the major contender for fiction's next generation. Her aim is nothing less than redemption, and she delivers.”
– Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club and Lit

“This is such a fine novel. Stone Arabia, Spiotta's last book, was a complete thrill. With Innocents and Others she offers even deeper, more crushing insights into the life of the artist: the compromises, the blind will, the personal costs and moral despair. And the heartbreaking friendship at the center of it all! What unfolds is simply flawless and epic.”
– Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“The brilliant Dana Spiotta had me from page one of Innocents and Others--a lithely intelligent, moving inquiry into the mysterious compositions of art and friendships.”
– Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

“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

“[A] raw retrospective following the friendship of two filmmakers over years, miles, and frames.”
– Cosmopolitan

“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

“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…That Jelly is both an emotional con artist and deeply relatable is a testament to the scope of Spiotta’s talents. Endearing fabulists populate all of her novels, from the Vietnam era radical turned suburban mom in her National Book Award-nominated Eat the Document to the rock star of his own imagination in 2011’s Stone Arabia. Jelly evokes nostalgia for an era in which you had to be home to be reached while pointing toward the anxieties of our own age…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

“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...sharp, kinetic...Ms. Spiotta writes about film with great knowledge and insight.”
– Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“A brilliant split-screen view of women working within and without the world of Hollywood… illuminating …Fans of Spiotta’s previous novel, ‘Stone Arabia’, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, will recognize the author’s elastic style…Among chapters of conventional narration, Spiotta presents the transcript of an eight-hour interview. There are 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…The story’s real heart, though, is the tenacious relationship between Meadow and Carrie, the serious documentarian and the Hollywood hitmaker. Working in the tight space of this relatively slim novel, Spiotta explores the remarkable species of sisterhood that survives jealousy and disappointment and even years of neglect. The tension between artistic purity and commercial popularity may tax their affection, but nothing can blot out their shared history, their abiding devotion, the great wonder that is a true friend. Toward the end, Meadow considers how to create a ‘glimpse of the sublime.’ Considering the limits of her medium, she asks herself, ‘Can an image convey something unnameable, impossible, invisible?’ The quiet miracle of this novel is that it does just that.”
– Ron Charles, The 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, The 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