Eat the Document: A Novel - Tapa dura

In the heyday of the 1970s underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker - passionate, idealistic and in love - design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities and never see one another again. Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother's generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of choices made back then in the 1990s, Dana Spiotta deftly explores the connection between the two eras - their language, technology, music and activism. Eat the Document is an important and revelatory novel about the culture of rebellion. 'Stunning . . . a glittering collage of a book - a book that possesses the staccato ferocity of a Joan Didion essay and the historical resonance and razzle-dazzle language of a Don DeLillo novel . . . a symphonic portrait of three decades of American life . . . filled with musical leitmotifs and searing, strobe-lighted images of contemporary life' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

'With only her second book Dana Spiotta has become, I think, a major American writer. The ironic connections she makes between the cultural divide of the early '70s and late '90s are chilling and delicious. This scary and often brilliant novel comes together beautifully in the end - there's an intense satisfaction of seeing everything link up so movingly and with such warmth, and yet Spiotta is the only female writer I know whose prose reminds me of the cool ambient poetry and steely precision of Don DeLillo, and Eat the Document is as darkly exact and thrilling as the political novels of Joan Didion' Bret Easton Ellis