Eat the Document: A Novel

Synopsis

In the 1970s, 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 — and she has no idea whether Bobby is alive or dead.

An ambitious and powerful story about idealism, passion, and sacrifice, Eat the Document shifts between the underground movement of the 1970s and the echoes and consequences of that movement in the1990s. It is a riveting portrait of two eras and one of the most provocative and compelling novels of recent years.

The New York Times - Julia Scheeres

Spiotta has written a glorious sendup of contemporary social and ecological activists with all their preening idealism and absurdity especially the intelligent-sounding nonsense people spew at one another, even as they rarely connect on any meaningful level. This same disconnectedness plagues older characters like Mary and Bobby. Haunted by the past and insecure in the present, they are strangers to their lovers, friends and families, and ultimately to themselves.