What’s love got to do with it? In Dana Spiotta’s latest novel, Innocents and Others, love and friendship might be all we need. As with several of her prior novels, the time period of this story ranges from the late Sixties to present day. The novel’s settings move between the West and East Coasts. The characters’ attempts to connect—via film, friendship, telephone calls, sex, self-understanding—ground the novel’s scope and offer emotional depth for the readers of this most recent addition to Spiotta’s growing body of stellar work.

In this novel, as in Spiotta’s other works, there’s a density, even a geological weight: an accumulation of things and a lingering and extended touch of the narrative hand on every object that is culled from the past and fitted into the time period of the narrative. For example, Spiotta captures the nuance of a phone call in the days of landlines: the language of the technology itself (“These were the odd ways the phone communicated with sounds: urgent beeps to say hang-up, long-belled rings to say answer, rude blasts of a busy signal to say no”) and the intimacies of a voice (“ ‘Hello,’ she said. Her voice sliding easily through the ls, to the waiting, hopeful o”). It’s as if Spiotta were both anthropologist and archeologist, studying the smallest cultural gestures and sifting through all that a decade discards, as history and, especially, American culture rush along in pursuit of the Eternal New. It’s as if she is drawn to an analog past in the midst of a digital present.

“I do believe we are shaped by the machines we use, which is why I’m skeptical of new technology that claims to make our lives better,” Spiotta says. “I feel we too often embrace some new device before we understand its effects. What defines ‘better’? Maybe a better question is what enables us to connect with one another, and what interferes with real connection?”

 Detritus is significant to Spiotta in creating her narrative worlds. “What gets discarded as we move through time interests me,” she says. “The phone is a prime example. Talking on the telephone has become almost obsolete. Today I find the phone kind of intrusive; I prefer to text or email. But what have we given up? Talking and listening on the phone is sound-driven intimacy—it is all about voice and nuance of tone—which is lost in text and emails. It has to change our interactions.” Spiotta continues, “Maybe we can better understand where we are when we understand where we’ve been, so the things we discard matter. There is a moment in the book where one of the characters looks at I-90, the railroad, and the Erie Canal all running side by side, like a living timeline of technological progress.   The efficiency of the interstate had unintended effects: it made it less likely for you to wander into an undiscovered place. There is much less interaction with the landscape. Places feel very uniform when traveling on the interstate. What do we lose when velocity and efficiency trump all other considerations?”   

This thematic focus on what has been discarded extends to those often marginalized in American society. Although two of the central characters—Meadow and Carrie—enjoy success as filmmakers (even though Meadow remains an edgy documentary film maker, whereas Carrie makes popular American comedies with a subversive, feminist twist), two characters, Jelly and Sarah (both subjects, one realized and one abandoned, of Meadow’s work), represent the antithesis of the American Dream—and, perhaps, draw the reader’s attention most fully. Jelly is a con artist of sorts, using the phone as a way to intimate herself into the lives of second tier Hollywood celebrities: the music composers and screenwriters rather than directors and top-billing stars. Sarah, subject of an aborted film project by Meadow, has committed, as Spiotta notes, “the worst mistake a person can make”—and is imprisoned as a result. Yet, Spiotta invests Sarah with a moral integrity and moral imagination that lend a strong note of redemption to her actions as a young, teenage mother, trying to scrape by as a lover and a mother in an economy that doesn’t give her due except as a body, pleasing to the eye. 

Innocents contrasts sight and sound throughout. There is Jelly, who has suffered an illness and lost much of her vision, attempting connections through telephone lines. Jelly coins a term, “body listening,” as a way of surrendering to the experience or to the art—an apt metaphor for Art, Love, and Sex. She believes, as Spiotta explains, “that she’s collaborating with Jack [a music composer] through their conversations.” Jelly sees herself as a kind of Muse to the film industry types with whom she connects. Yet she represents that disconnection or alienation experienced by so many: she “sees” herself as someone other than the body she inhabits (“dowdy and heavy”). She doesn’t feel aligned to her body. But as Spiotta says, “Jelly’s resistance to her own body is impossible, which makes her story poignant. Eventually the men she seduces all want to see a photograph of her. The camera reduces you to appearance above all else.” As Carrie observes, watching Meadow’s documentary film about Jelly, “How much are we our bodies? And why is it so different for women?”—complicated in this Land of Perpetual Youth.

Spiotta’s novel examines how we give cultural primacy to the visual. “When you watch a film,” Spiotta notes, “even if the voice-over tells you that what you are seeing is fake, on some level you will believe what you see. Images seem to short-circuit rational thought. We feel the urge to believe what we see even though we know images are manipulated and distorted all the time.” 

At one point, Meadow observes of her work that she’s “always been attracted to afterlives, codas, postscripts,” which might well serve as an epigraph to Spiotta’s fiction as a whole. These women have passions that they serve and that serve them, for better and for worse. These passions and obsessions, as in all of Spiotta’s novels, are weighed down by the gravity of the world, as they engage in a Sisyphean struggle to achieve what they desire. As Spiotta claims, “I like writing about extreme characters; it’s a way of looking at ourselves magnified”—exposing a reality that many might want to hide or to mitigate.

Resistance to the dominant culture is a refrain in Spiotta’s fiction, and the characters in Innocents are no exception. “If you look at the margins, there has been a constant strata of resisters in American history,” Spiotta observes. “I am drawn to resistance of various kinds: political, artistic, and even the private resistance of the eccentric or the crank. Meadow and Carrie resist what they’re told to accept.  Certainly Jelly resists being merely the person the world sees her as—she wants to invent a category of her own creation.” They are the latest evidence of the bumper sticker that reads “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.”

Innocents and Others is as seductive as one of Jelly’s calls; Spiotta’s confident writing draws in the reader. The novel employs film scripts, movie blog essays, online commentary, and other forms of media to assemble a collage narrative and to provide differing character viewpoints. Spiotta takes her reader inside each of the women to strengthen the reader’s empathy with them. And Innocents is transparent, at many levels, with its artifice. As Meadow writes about the Orson Welles character with whom she claims to spend a year, “He could make a fork disappear into the air with a wave of the napkin and the lift of an eyebrow. He talked as he worked his magic and he revealed his trickery, which only makes the trickery work better.” Spiotta is working equal magic with the reader, all while exposing the manipulation. As Spiotta explains, “Meadows’s films can manipulate the audience more because she allows the audience to see the magician’s tricks. She is revealing her methods, so she wins your trust. As a writer, maybe I do a similar thing when I play with or point to different ways of storytelling.  But my goal is to create a collaboration between the writer and reader, to invite them into my own questions.  I want the book to be emotionally engaging, but I also want it to be provocative.”

J. W. Bonner teaches Humanities and writing at Asheville School in Asheville, N.C.