Dana Spiotta Won’t Make It Simple

Innocents and Others is all about such issues: It’s a novel that “moves towards complexity,” to echo Spiotta’s phrase. The book is made of voices, made of fragments — a tapestry in which certain events are recounted again and again. “I like stories that are narrated several times,” Spiotta explains. “And I like books that teach us how they need to be read.” In Innocents and Others, that intention plays out in tricks and hoaxes, re-imaginings and outright lies. Spiotta establishes this perspective from the outset; she opens the novel with an essay, written for the fictional website “Women and Film” by a documentarian named Meadow Mori, who is a key protagonist. Meadow writes of her affair, as a graduate of a progressive Los Angeles private school, with a filmmaker we come to recognize as Orson Welles, but there are inconsistencies, misrememberings woven into her account. “People, I am calling BS on this whole essay,” a reader writes in an accompanying comments thread. “Welles famously lived and died on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood, not in Brentwood. Everybody knows that. Even the death date is off. She is pulling your chain.” It’s a subtle, and ingenious, strategy for encoding doubt into the center of the narrative, making us question the accuracy of what we’re reading, what we’ve read. “I don’t think of it as lying,” Spiotta writes, channeling the voice of Welles through that of Meadow. “I think of it as a little story I told about me, or what people think of me.” That of course, is the point precisely — the way impressions take on the weight of truth. “If you show the trick,” Spiotta acknowledges with a rich laugh, “it works better. I admit the story is a construction, that it is made of many overlapping stories, but if that’s a matter of seduction, of manipulation, it is also one of trust.”
Seduction, manipulation, trust: These are all components of the postmodern writer’s toolbox, in which subjectivity sits at the heart of everything. In Innocents and Others, Spiotta highlights this by pairing Meadow with her best friend, Carrie Wexler, now a director of romantic comedies; their shared history is the push-and-pull out of which much of the novel’s tension grows. “In some ways,” Spiotta notes, “this is a coming-of-age novel. The people who are with us when our sensibilities are made . . . they remain important. No other relationship is like that. They remind us of who we used to be.” For Meadow and Carrie, such a dynamic goes back to junior high. In an essay of her own for “Women and Film,” Carrie recalls shooting their first films together, pratfalls improvised in Super 8. When they watch the footage, Meadow’s fall is funnier, more surprising, although she quickly deflects Carrie’s praise. “You mean yours,” she says, flipping ownership back onto her friend. “I was only the actor; it was your film.” Carrie is surprised by the observation — and then transformed. “She was right,” she writes, “it was my film — the idea, the phrase, hadn’t occurred to me before . . . Our life together had begun.” For Spiotta, these small moments, these nearly forgotten gestures, make us who we are. “Perhaps if they met today,” she reflects, “they wouldn’t be friends. But one thing that interests me in all my novels are relationships that are unconditional: mother/son, brother/sister. We can be careless, we can abuse them, but they don’t go away. Meadow makes Carrie better at doing what she does.”

On the one hand, Carrie’s essay works as an example of doubling, a deft counterpoint to Meadow’s, and a framing mechanism. Still, if that’s all there was to Innocents and Others, it would be too simple, too much on the nose. The complexity of the novel comes from Spiotta’s ability to blur the boundaries, to evoke not only friendship but also perception, consciousness, the way we impose our sensibilities on others, whether or not by intent. Meadow offers a case in point; her documentaries seek to peel back the surfaces of big stories: Kent State, Argentina’s Dirty Wars. She is drawn to the collaborators, to the perpetrators, to the voices and perspectives often left unheard. She develops strategies to signal her complicity, yet in the end, they are not enough. Spiotta explores such a conundrum through a third character, Jelly (also known as Nicole, or Amy), about whom Meadow makes a film called Inward Operator; a phone phreak, a random caller, her story insinuates itself throughout the novel, as she seduces men she doesn’t know, using her voice. When it comes time to meet them, however, she disappears, another phantom of the culture, another ghost in the machine. “I wanted to bring everything back to the body,” Spiotta says. “I wanted to examine what it feels like to engage with technologies, with mediations, Jelly on the phone or Meadow filming. I am interested in consciousness, in the engagement that happens in the mind. This is part of the body, too, how consciousness interacts. I wanted to write about listening or seeing, how technology connects us, but also creates distance.”
Such a distance emerges in the space between Meadow and her subjects, between Jelly and the men she calls. But it is not the idea of distance that compels Spiotta so much as the effect. For her, fiction is an art of action, and narrative is built, as it has ever been, on the interplay of individuals in a recognizable world. If film, or the telephone, is mediated, then so too are our deepest relationships, the bridges that we build between us, by which we find a fleeting sort of grace. Yes, Innocents and Others suggests, we may never truly see each other; it is impossible to remove ourselves, our interpretations and our judgments, as the lens through which we read the world. Still, Spiotta insists, “through all these scrims, there are genuine moments of real connection. Despite ourselves, we connect.”