ITT: Dana Spiotta

Just finished Eat The Document and I'm mulling it over. Going to start on Stone Arabia shortly.

The strangest thing for me was how bothered I was by the little details she got wrong -- what exactly was and wasn't the technological state of 1998. Internet culture, zine culture, activist culture all feel like they're maybe two-three years accelerated from where they 'should' have been. Seattle but no explicit reference to the WTO protests even though they're contemporaneous, etc.

So many things felt more right than I'm used to that all the other things felt all the more bothersome.

Also I'm trying to work through the shape/movement/point of the book. There's a strong structure underneath it, but I worry too much the structure drove the characters than the opposite?

Great read, nonetheless.

based on this woman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Ann_Power

i really liked eat the document. stone arabia and lightning field were decent reads but both lacking something.

ive read all 3 and liked all 3

she blurbed rachel kushner's 'the flamethrowers' which im reading right now. the voice is v similar to spiotta's imo, it's p good so far

i hope to read that soon. i have a kindle sample i think.

my sense in ETD is that she made the son a music fan / archives obsessive just because that was how she intended to move forward the discovery plot? weird how in the period sections there's so little music, but in the contempo sections its this pervasive touchstone.

nonetheless, the final coda with holding onto the archives to hold on to yourself was really perfect and moving -- but i'm not sure how it fits with the broader themes of the novel. is it about memory and forgetting? rediscovery? the contempo layer sort of has that quality. but the past sections don't. the agent orange stuff feels awkward too, and going somewhere else entirely? i'm not sure i can figure out how it hangs together.

http://nyti.ms/20Ba5ju