KEY POINTS:
Mary Whittaker has screwed up big time. Now she is on the run, has changed her name, and is flipping burgers in some one-lung town on the west coast of the United States.
Meanwhile, Mary's old boyfriend and partner in crime, Bobby Desoto (aka Nash), has his own new life co-ordinating juvenile revolutionary clubs out of a rundown secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles. Twenty-five years flick by like one of Desoto's grainy old anti-war films, and yet these two are still living under assumed names and are still wanted by the FBI.
Will they ever be found, what did they do and, more importantly, will they ever see each other again? We follow Mary as she runs from one life to the next, remaining just one step ahead of the law. She must reinvent herself constantly, never able to put down roots or establish any meaningful relationships. In some ways, she is in a far worse prison than the one she would have inhabited had she been caught. This lack of connection, unfortunately, is also duplicated for the reader - we, like the people she meets, never really get to know, and therefore connect with, Mary.
Nash, on the other hand, has become a caricature of his former self. He hangs out with people 30 years his junior - helping to bend their impressionable minds, just liked he bent Mary's all those years before, to his far-left philosophy. He is a pathetic individual who forgot to grow up.
Spiotta spins this yarn across three decades. We start in the early 70s, with free love, women's liberation and the Beach Boys, plough through Reagan's 80s and reconnect with our protagonists in the computer savvy late-90s. Although life has moved on, our two protagonists are still caught in the 70s.
But Mary's son has an internet connection and an inkling that his mother's empty past is filled with dark secrets. Ironically, the person she cares about and protected more than herself now has the power to unravel her secret life.
Spiotta's objective, here, is to question America's lack of anti-war sentiment towards the conflict in Iraq, by recalling the angst and disaffection felt by American youth at the time of the Vietnam War. These people, she seems to be saying, are hiding, just like Mary and Nash, by remaining quiet. Like Mary, this book has its flaws. Yet, interestingly, it is these very flaws that provide its character and verve.
In the end, we are happy to trade the smooth, ordered ride, for the originality and freshness that Spiotta's journey provides.
* Steve Scott is an Auckland reviewer.
Eat the Document
By Dana Spiotta (Picador $27.99)
