Innocents and Others: A Novel
Written by Dana Spiotta
Narrated by January LaVoy
4/5
()
About this audiobook
Innocents and Others is about two women who grow up in LA in the 80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common—except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their friendship is complicated, but their devotion to each other trumps their wildly different approaches to film and to life. Meadow was always the more idealistic and brainy of the two; Carrie was more pragmatic. Into their lives comes Jelly, a master of seduction who calls powerful men and seduces them not with sex, but by being a superior listener. All of these women grapple with the question of how to be good: a good lover, a good friend, a good mother, a good artist.
A startlingly acute observer of the way we live now, Dana Spiotta “has created a new kind of great American novel” (The New York Times Magazine). “Impossible to put down” (Marie Claire), Innocents and Others is “a sexy, painfully insightful, and strangely redemptive novel about the ways we misread one another—with an ending that comes at you like a truck around a blind curve and stays with you for much, much longer” (Esquire).
Editor's Note
A pure pleasure to read…
This compulsively readable novel explores philosophical questions about the nature of art — whether art for art’s sake is honesty or pretension — while also providing perceptive insights about love and lifelong friendship.
Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others; Stone Arabia, A National Books Critics Circle Award finalist; and Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award. Spiotta is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel is Wayward. She lives in Syracuse, New York.
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Reviews for Innocents and Others
63 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I began reading this book armed only with the knowledge that a person whose taste in books is similar to mine made an off-hand comment about it being very good. The title gave me the expectation of the book being a collection of short stories, which was only the first surprising thing about this novel. I didn't even read the dust jacket until the book turned abruptly from being one story into being a very different one, and I think I was lucky in approaching Innocents and Others in complete ignorance about it.Innocents and Others centers on Meadow, a driven young filmmaker, who has a strong friendship with Carrie, another filmmaker. As their lives progress from high school to adulthood, their friendship shifts in the way of adult friends whose lives have moved in different directions. But more than friendship, this book is about filmmaking and a passion for films and how they are made, with both women pursuing different visions in that art form. There's a lot of the detail of how films are made, the history of film and detailed accounts of each of Meadow's documentary films. It was fascinating, and I ended up looking up some of her topics to learn more. I suspect that Innocents and Others would not appeal to everyone. It's an emotionally raw novel that is nonetheless written in a distancing way and the details of film-making may not prove fascinating for all readers. I loved this book, with its unapologetic focus on female friendship and the complexities of relationships.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5As others have noted, Dana Spiotta's Innocents and Others is torpedoed by its cover copy, which promises a "collision" between the lives of filmmakers Meadow and Carrie and that of Jelly, who is described as "older, erotic, and mysterious," the purveyor of seductive phone - well, not sex exactly, but intimacy. It was, in fact, this very promise of drama tinged with immorality that led me to request an ARC from the publisher. What I got instead was a plodding exposé of each woman's life, which barely intersects with the others, much less revealing the others in a new light. That Spiotta chose to give the starring role in her narrative to shallow, self-obsessed, privileged Meadow - the poorest choice from an already sparsely populated pool - secured Innocents and Others's place among the worst books I have read this year.This is not to say that Spiotta can't write; she can, and does, beautifully on occasion:"A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word. It is maybe a fabule, a kind of wish-story, something almost true, a mist of the possible where nothing was yet there. With elements both stolen and invented—which is to say, invented. And it has to feel more dream than lie as you speak it."This theme of self-invention, the mutability of identity, is at the heart of this book, and what a timely theme it is. Too bad that the lies Meadow, Carrie, and Jelly tell about themselves are no more interesting than their realities.I received a free copy of Innocents and Others from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Is it reductionist to say Spiotta’s work is a response to so much media being readily available to creative types for the first time in history? Think of the role of internet in Eat the Document. Yeah, that’s reductionist. Innocents and Others is a book about friendships, and how we build ourselves with images we’ve consumed. There is a lot here about female beauty standards that we’ve read before but not with such delicacy. I’m a cis hetero male so I’ll let others comment more about that. What I’m not hearing people say is that this is a novel about haves and have-nots. There is a spectrum of desire and fulfillment in this book. It was wonderful. I didn’t get it at first. Another caveat is that this book is so packed with film buff minutiae that it might lack context to readers that are not film buffs. Luckily, we live in an age when so much media readily at our... If you’re lucky enough to be one of the haves. Or perhaps, like Dylan, you threw it all away.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beautiful novel showing the journey in the lives of two friends as they become artists. Beautiful imagry.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was very ambitious, and had some interesting things to say about about communicating, the decisions involved in the creative process, what makes a good life, and telling truths vs. lies—all aspects of art-making (and life) that I'm interested in. But ultimately the book didn't hold together, and the total effect was of a bunch of jump cuts—the whole thing was very cinematic, and rightly so since film is its main theme—that never congealed into a whole. Though who knows, that might have been part of the point too.I like the films Spiotta chose to frame the novel, and I liked the characters. I also thought her use of language was interesting—the slightly stilted form forcing the reader to think about how the dialogue might be spoken so that it might sound like someone was actually talking—but I never quite bought the story. It was a good effort, though, and it kept me reading, even if in the end the book didn't feel like it lived up to its promise.