Innocents and Others is a confrontation with the blessings and curses of the body, the pleasures and costs of fantasy, the impossibility of either total truth or total fiction. It is a work of acute cultural intelligence and moral imagination, and is far too wise to offer anything as paltry as answers to the great and terrible questions that it raises.
Innocents And Others is one of those uncanny novels whose characters and ideas linger long after the story is over. In the end, Spiotta's portrayal of artistic idealism and ambition is unexpectedly moving. As Meadow would say, what a mystery the way things act on us.
[Spiotta's] prose in Innocents and Others veers between the superb and the insipid ... In this new book Spiotta's ideas seem to precede her characters and their emotions. It makes for an anemic, aimless narrative ... And yet, for all that, I felt glad at the end of Innocents and Others that Spiotta had written it. The recent fashions in fiction have favored fine-tuned varieties of realism, from Franzen to Knausgaard to Ferrante. Spiotta, by contrast, remains unswervingly committed to ideas — of spectatorship and simulation, of the potential aloneness of the never-being-alone of modern culture.
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'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 -— writers like Lisa Moore, Tom Drury and Paul Beatty. 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.
There are many ways to look at Spiotta’s new novel, like a well-cut diamond turned toward a source of soft illumination, each rotation catching a different set of prismatic refractions of secrets, wants and transformations...At the conclusion, the reader is left with a multitude of questions to consider. Among them: Can an artist live an enriching life without having an audience? It’s a tough question to answer, but it’s certain that Spiotta’s audience will keep growing with this stunning novel.
Any summary is bound to lay a heavy hand on [the book's] jumbled structure, the way peculiar characters and strange events are introduced only to be identified and tied together in surprising ways much later. I wouldn’t blame you for assuming the book contains more reels of weirdness than you’re willing to sit through. But, honestly, while the novel’s form is promiscuous, 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.
It’s as though, by not ever quite knowing what this book is about, we are drawn further and further into its complicated and fabulously intelligent interior. Full of film references and critiques, essays and lists, Innocents and Others puts information and theory in the place where in other novels a 'character' might reside ... Innocents and Others is also about looking, seeing, paying attention, asking ourselves if we can ever know the full story, ever really understand what makes a person tick. Rather than embodying the traditional idea of the novel as a character portrait, it’s more as if the page we are reading is a sort of film in itself, flickering before us in a sequence of events and images and ideas ... if that sounds dull, it shouldn’t, because every sentence is full of information and verve, jumping with thoughtfulness and precision and, like that flash of white teeth, the unexpected.
Without a doubt, Spiotta is a novelist of ideas, but she’s extraordinary in her ability to shrug off the refrigerated grandiosity that typically infects such writers, including DeLillo himself...Spiotta’s idea-driven fiction feels extraordinarily alive because she’s just as interested in the tensions between two artist friends as she is in the friction between morality and creativity or truth and art or identity and time.
In Dana Spiotta's dazzling new novel, Innocents and Others, movies play a starring role. But they are just one form of storytelling examined in this smart and fascinating book, a hall of mirrors full of shifting identities so intriguing it's hard to look away...Spiotta keeps us always eager for the next twist, and her characters are both believable and freshly original. Their lives also give her a path to explore the art of narrative that is her own medium.
Dana Spiotta's fearless, ambitious new novel is the fourth in a remarkable series of deep dives into our culture's obsession with fame and technological change...Spiotta has been compared to Joan Didion and Don DeLillo, but as her work accumulates, it's clear she's one of a kind, on her singular path through our contemporary wilderness.
Unfortunately, Innocents does not deliver on its ambitions. Despite the gifted Ms. Spiotta’s feel for the dislocations of modernity and her sharp, kinetic prose, Innocents turns out to be a lumpy, unpersuasive novel — enlivened by some arresting moments and thoughtful riffs, but ultimately a sort of hodgepodge of derivative scenes and ideas that have been cut together into a meaning-heavy montage.
Innocents and Others is an asymmetrical novel told in fragments, and frustrating readerly expectations is part of Spiotta’s intentions (in this she’s like her heroine)...That it ends with an artist all but renouncing her art — a new self founded on notionally altruistic self-negation — is puzzling, but the lives of artists don’t tend to be neat. Innocents and Others is Spiotta’s strangest, darkest, and most mature work.
Spiotta’s risks do pay off, though, and this is how and why: because her characters are so self-conscious about the perils and joys of friendship and filmmaking and about understanding how the stories one sees on the screen come to influence — and at times, infect — the story one tells to, and about, oneself. Life imitates art — we’ve been told this so many times that it must be true. But it is noted much less often that before life can imitate art, art has to imitate art. I know of no other novel so obsessed with dramatizing this truth, no other novel whose tensest moments (and Innocents and Others is full of tense moments) occur when an artist is desperately trying to figure out how to steal from someone else’s film to make her own.
Innocents and Others is more expansive [than Stone Arabia], but the same omniscient intelligence is employed in layering ironies and superimposing themes of memory, identity, reality and representation while building toward the two women’s inevitable convergence...But even as the book’s complexities turn into high gear, Ms. Spiotta’s writing stays cool to the touch.
Spiotta’s dramatization of the Meadow-Carrie dyad is masterly, with lines (in third-person authorial voiceover, and in first person in the voices of both Meadow and Carrie) that seem delivered — improvised — by women who’ve known each other and even the reader forever: deeply encoded, privately referential and pregnant with pander, indulgence and resentment...
Chapter by chapter, Innocents and Others is endearing, engaging and clever, but it never shows off. In fact I was dazzled by how this seemingly low-key tale about movie lovers hanging out, falling in and out of love, and playing around with their hobbies and their art, turned out to be so moving and brilliant. Innocents and Others is a work of art about making art that matters.
The visionary liberty and daring with which Dana Spiotta has crafted her brilliant new novel, Innocents and Others (Scribner), is both inspirational and infectious...she 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.
As a novelist, Spiotta is cool in both senses of the word: Her books, including the prizewinning Stone Arabia and Eat the Document, are praised for their taut modernity and lauded by literary supernovas like Don DeLillo and George Saunders. But she can also be chilly emotionally, and it’s not until late in Innocents’ disjointed narrative that her remove falls away.
It takes unusual talent to create empathy for a woman who manipulates her targets the way telephone con artist Jelly does in Dana Spiotta’s new novel, Innocents and Others...intimate [and] unsettling.
Spiotta’s own hybrid form, piecing together narrative, internet chats, transcripts of films and phone conversations, presents multiple storylines from shifting angles. Meadow’s story unfolds in tandem with that of an even more intriguing character, Jelly; the strands cohere towards the end when Jelly becomes one of Meadow’s subjects ... Spiotta perfectly conjures the static intimacy of long phone calls, and sensually evokes Jelly’s nervous excitement — part sinister, part erotic, part poignant — as she draws the men out, in one case forming a durable, eerily codependent relationship ... This is an extremely clever novel, about art, identity and ideas.
When it comes to ideas, Spiotta has always operated on an astounding number of levels at once...Innocents and Others accomplishes a feat like depicting both female friendships and friendships between artists, in all their complexity, through nothing more than a series of quiet moments scattered across its 275 pages.
Innocents and Others is a novel about how intimacy works best from a distance. As is made painfully clear when Meadow coaxes Jelly into the light, direct encounter tends to dissolve what remains of the means of connection. Jelly is all but ruined, China-Girled by Meadow’s movie. This coming together of the novel’s two plots is the least compelling aspect of Innocents and Others. Its nod to narrative unity is forced, but the best part about the nod is how convincingly it suggests that we were all better off talking to each other in the dark.
Innocents and Others is a wonderfully alive novel about filmmaking, friendship, and self-creation. Its magic lies in the intelligence and depth of its sentences.
