Fiction:We live in terrible times - but then, times have been terrible for quite a while now, almost forever in fact, writes Eileen Battersby.
And no one feels worse about it than the ineffectual former radical who tried to change the world, didn't and suddenly is no longer young, and doomed to passing the hours doing not all that much - aside from remembering, recognising a lyric here, a snatch of music and maybe drinking too much, if only to forget.
Eat the Document is a thoughtful, often thrilling and deeply despairing novel that evokes not only the horror, but the regret, the well-intentioned gestures and the messy legacy of lives lived under the shadow of missed opportunities and plans that simply collapsed into nothing. It is a portrait of a country in crisis coming to terms with the loss of its innocence.
Mary was young and had already made an important discovery, "despite what people may imagine, having nothing to lose is a lot like having nothing . . ." The taut opening sequence follows Mary through the ritual of trying to become someone else, not a particular someone else - just someone other than her self.
"Mary finally sat on a bed in a motel room that very first night after she had taken a breathless train ride under darkening skies and through increasingly unfamiliar landscape." It is the end of her final day as her old self. She has to change everything; her name, her face, the colour of her hair. This is what it means - to go underground. It is to become invisible. She knew it wouldn't be too difficult - after all "she was not ugly, she was not pretty. But just that old fashioned word, plain . . . It meant she could move somewhere new and go to the store or apply for a job and people wouldn't feel threatened or aroused. She knew she could go unnoticed". Is she another Patty Hearst? Or is she just a girl trying to find personal meaning by doing something public.
Right from the beginning of Eat The Document, Dana Spiotta, a gifted US writer who has captured the mood of the early 1970s, an America still reeling from the mess that was Vietnam, the age of protest, Watergate and the image of a US president sweating beneath the TV studio lights, is crafting something special. There is an urgency about this book, an energy that gives it a subtle, penetrating edge. The prose achieves the limpid cool exactness of Don De Lillo. Spiotta shares his instinct for the image of the moment, the lingering sense of falling through space and into history. Both writers also look to an earlier American master, one who also knew the power of the image, and the weight of an eloquent phrase - John Dos Passos.
Within pages, Mary emerges as a convincing character, a girl who tried to do something that was important or maybe something that gave her relevance. It is possible to share her unease as she sits and waits, possibly for a killer who may be about to burst through the door of her motel room. She doesn't want to die in the shower.
Without a trace of sentiment, Spiotta records the "very last time" Mary phones home. "Twenty-nine months, three weeks and two days after she first went underground. She called and her mother answered the phone. She listened as her mother said Hello? and waited, not hanging up, because she couldn't, not just yet, and her mother said, "Mary, is that you? Mary? With a plaintive, quiet voice."
It is but one of the narrative's many brilliant, heart-bursting episodes. Mary leans against the phone booth and "knew then she couldn't call again, ever. Never, ever, never." The image of the girl who has lost her mother as a result of a radical choice becomes as real as if we are watching her across a room.
Then the narrative switches to the first person and a boy, Jason, obviously a teenager, is speaking about his mother, the person he lives with.
"She never seems drunk - she doesn't get all slurry or drop things. She just seems increasingly placid and a bit dulled by bedtime. She is already the sort of person who seems constantly to be halfway elsewhere."
The young girl - Mary - has become the middle aged, shadowy depressed mother of a boy who watches her as if she were a vaguely irritating lab rat just about meriting study. Spiotta never turns her story into a simple slice of domestic realism. This is a layered work, as well as a vividly episodic, time-shifting collage populated by a group of characters all shaped by the mood of a society battling its present and stalked by its past. Part documentary, part lament, it is America, shell shocked and staggering under a weary defiance. Spiotta's quietly virtuoso US National Book Award finalist reiterates the belated need to unleash the dancing girls, open the Man Booker Prize to US writers and raise the stakes.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Eat the Document By Dana Spiotta Picador, 290 pp. £12.99
