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.
