Eat the Document - Hardcover

"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, author of "Lunar Park"

Dana Spiotta, whom Michiko Kakutani called "wonderfully observant and wonderfully gifted...with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadness of contemporary life" "(The New York Times)," has written a bold and moving novel about a fugitive radical from the 1970s who has lived in hiding for twenty-five years. "Eat the Document" is a hugely compelling story of activism, sacrifice, and the cost of living a secret.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 each other 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 those choices in the 1990s, Dana Spiotta deftly explores the connection between the two eras -- their language, technology, music, and activism. Character-driven and brilliant, "Eat the Document" is an important and revelatory novel about the culture of rebellion, with particular resonance now.