Eat the Document

The Fog of War, and of Oregon

Dana Spiotta's subtle and captivating novel Eat the Document does not, like some of its late-twentieth century characters, conjure the forgotten stuff of history to fetishize it. (As a certain breed of tech-savvy male fetishizes the famous, never-released Dylan documentary that gives this book its title, and its sense of erasure.) The past, and its secrets, are always in dialogue with a deceptive present here, namely that of Mary, a Vietnam era radical who went underground in 1972, after a botched protest that involved bombs and the summer houses of corporate board members. We will know Mary by three other names, and a few other personalities; she is also a hipster, a lover, a fugitive, and eventually a white wine spritzer-drinking mom. She is living quietly in the Pacific Northwest, where all around her neo-radicals are appropriating the values she worked so hard to forget were hers. (Spiotta affectionately catalogues these social action types via an indie bookstore characterized by wafting nag champa and spirited debate.) Mary's old boyfriend went underground as well, and like her he has gravitated to fog-and-coffee land. They are leading quiet, law-abiding lives -- they are getting away with it -- but a new generation of social malcontents are sure to make the realization sooner or later. They can't help but be fascinated by that older generation of radicals and their world, "a world," as Mary's son puts it, "where ordinary people actually did things. Things that affected, however tangentially, history."

Eat the Document seems at times too polite to really crack the lives of radicals -- Spiotta writes the kind of prose that begs to be described as lovely and minutely observed -- but it is a book that reveals its darkness and weirdness slowly. The corrosive nature of secrecy is there, as is the eerie ease of self-reinvention. Spiotta ultimately expresses a deep ambivalence to American culture and its affection for starting over, its "freedom from memory and history and accounting."

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