Innocents and Others

Dana Spiotta

(Picador, £8.99)

Review by Alastair Mabbott

LIKE her central character, filmmaker Meadow Mori, who lets her reels of raw footage suggest the structure of her documentaries as she’s editing them, Dana Spiotta has followed her instincts and moulded this novel into a shape that suits the story she wants to tell. Idiosyncratic and unclassifiable, Innocents and Others is unconstrained by tried-and-tested rules of structure and plotting.

It’s a novel about three women, principally arthouse documentary maker Meadow, and kicks off with her account of the year she spent living with Orson Welles while her parents believed she was at college on the other side of the country. As a tribute to the director who famously made a film called F For Fake, Meadow has seeded her tale with enough mistakes for cinema obsessives to realise she’s made it all up. She herself is one of those obsessives, an isolated and brittle character who begins her movie career with a Warhol-influenced film of her boyfriend talking for eight hours, gradually getting more drunk and confessional, and goes on to make an Oscar-nominated documentary about the Kent State killings. Her films don’t take the easy road, highlighting and reflecting the moral complexities of their subject matter.

We see her earliest meeting with Carrie Wexler, the childhood friend who shares her love of film but goes in a completely different direction, making mainstream female-centred comedies. Although a successful director herself, Carrie is a wife and mother who has an identity outside cinema. She’s less obsessive, more grounded and, as becomes apparent when they grow more distant from each other, more loyal to Meadow than Meadow is to her.

The third major character is Jelly, who comes of age at the height of phone phreaking, introduced to it by a boyfriend who uses boxes and whistles to con free calls out of the phone network. Jelly, who is almost blind at this point (though she later recovers her eyesight), becomes fascinated with the phone as a “weapon of intimacy” which enables her to enter the lives of complete strangers. She becomes quite the talking point among Hollywood types for finding out their numbers and starting telephone relationships with them. Overweight and dowdy in real life, she’s able to present an idealised version of herself to men she would never meet face to face. Eventually, Jelly’s path crosses with Meadow’s, with shattering consequences for both of them.

Innocents and Others is a sophisticated novel of ideas which reads deceptively easily, grappling with the ethics and aesthetics of filmmaking, the relationship of artifice to reality, coercion and control, with the strains on Meadow’s and Carrie’s friendship as an emotional anchor. As Meadow probes the limits and contradictions of her art, she’s pushing her own boundaries as well, and gazing into an abyss of loneliness as profound as Jelly’s. Despite a slight sense of dryness and distance, this is an original and refreshing novel which confirms that Spiotta is one of the most interesting of the current crop of American novelists.