A sense of the cinematic

Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta

Scribner 288 pp; $34 We often forget that the way something tastes is powerfully influenced by both its smell and appearance. A chip’s freshness and a soda pop’s fizz are affected by their explosive crunch and hiss as much as by age and carbonation. Remembering, and recording, the way the senses seep into each other is at the heart of Dana Spiotta’s fullbodied new novel, Innocents and Others, her followup to 2011’s Stone Arabia.

Spiotta introduces three characters whose stories bleed into one another — with wounds to show for it. First (in every way) is retired documentary film maker Meadow Mori, damned with a name that soft- serves her particular life-and-death flavour. As the novel opens, Meadow reveals through a first- person essay published online that as a teenager she had a love affair with Orson Welles up until his death, after which she began her career making the kind of high-minded documentaries that seem almost medicinal in their appeal. Describing her own work, Meadow comes off as a magnetic, if compulsively dishonest mythmaker, shaping reality to fit the stories she wants to tell. “I have always been attracted to afterlives, codas, postscripts, discursive asides, and especially mis- direction. Note this,” she says parenthetically, as much directive from Spiotta as from Meadow herself.

Meadow’s best friend is the feminist but still populist filmmaker Carrie Wexler, the conventional flip side of Meadow’s auteur. In alternating sections, Spiotta sculpts the two women as opposites: where Meadow is lit he, angular and humourless; Carrie is soft, self- doubting, and funny. Meadow comes from wealth, Carrie from genteel poverty. But they love movies, and as teens they come to know each other through film — making and watching them — even if their sensibilities later isolate them from one another.

Finally, t here is Jelly, named so by a former lover for being soft and sweet like a jelly doughnut. Where Meadow and Carrie use film making as away of interacting with the world through a camera, Jelly uses the telephone, through which she creates private narratives with strangers as a kind of master catfisher. Jelly, who has lost most of her vision to meningitis, cold- calls powerful men, drawing them into intimate conversations with the deftness of her mind and voice. Jelly’s story is absorbing in the way that certain conversations stop time, making you conscious only of the words you’re hearing, and here the novel spirals into a glorious love affair with sonic details, luxuriating in the intimate history of “phone phreaking.”

The stories converge when Meadow hears of Jelly — or rather, her phone persona, Nicole. Intrigued, she seeks her out to make a documentary about her, an experience that changes both characters in incremental but indelible ways.

As it dines upon t he s e nses, I nnocents a nd Others roots itself in the body — not just the physical one, but also the corpus of creative work that we leave i n our wake. The bodies that belong to each of the three main characters are described at length: Meadow’s exotic thinness, Carrie’s flabbiness (“Flabby in every way,” as she describes herself ), and Jelly, whose contempt for her own soft, heavy body leads her to a vocation that hides it from view, allowing her to live through her voice. All three women live in their bodies with varying levels of honesty and comfort. Bodies lie, both to and for us.

Spiotta is clever, but not coy. She cannily and generously give us the tools we need to read these characters and understand how it is they interact with, or more often, juxtapose one another’s perspectives. Carrie serves as a counterpoint to the hyperbolic human expressions of sight (Meadow) and sound ( Jelly). Meadow lives through her eyes, privileging the silent moving image. Jelly lives entirely through her voice and heari ng, “l i stening with her body,” which feels “young and taut,” due to her gift of knowing people through their silences as well as speech. “What is love if not listening, as uninflected — as uncontained — as possible,” she says. Spiotta is, in effect, separating our senses.

The writing itself articulates senses in an erotic, wholehearted manner — such as the way a locomotive “lurches” over tracks, or the way a can of Diet Dr Pepper has a “slightly cooked peppermint-chemical taste.” The novel comes together like a movie, the chapters sitting alongside each other with beautiful symmetry, the chapter titles reading like scene cards. As much elegance as there is in her design, however, sometimes Spiotta’s callbacks, inversions, and recontextualized allusions can distract. For example, she ends the book in the same way that Meadow ends her best- known documentary, adding a coda that undermines the finality of the preceding conclusion. Echoing Meadow’s t aste for “afterlives, codas, postscripts, discursive asides, and especially misdirection,” the move feels tactical, even as it impresses.

Here Spiotta turns herself into documentarian, dirtying the shot as Meadow does in her own films, showing a bit of her head or shoulder. Spiotta tells us what she’ ll show, and then a hundred pages later, shows us what she told. Not because she doesn’t trust us to see it, but because it’s vital to the author’s relationship to her story. The way Hitchcock’s cameos in his own films assert that he made these movies, Spiotta reminds us of the body behind the voice. Not just hers, but everyone’s.

THE NOVEL SPIRALS INTO A GLORIOUS LOVE AFFAIR WITH SONIC DETAILS