James Wood, in the March 3 issue of the New Yorker, reviewed two novels about radical anti-war groups of the late sixties/early seventies: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions. Because I have a stake in the subject, having made formative choices of my adulthood (my life-partner, career-path, lifestyle, politics, etc.) based on opposition to the Vietnam War, I ordered both books from my local library's interlibrary loan.
Meanwhile, I read a related novel, Dana Spiotta's 2006 Eat the Document, that Wood also mentioned in his review with the rare encomniums of "brittle elegance" and "spectacular." It certainly deserves the praise. (And by the way, there are surprisingly few books on this era; it takes objective, clear-eyed reporting, at a distance of a few decades, to accurately render this tumultuous period, and frankly, many of its would-be authors were too stoned at the time to remember much).
Dana Spiotta, by contrast, was only a child during this period, so she approaches it as a historian. She also uses an alternative culture closer to her own generation, the nineties, to contrast and thus characterize the earlier dissidents, intercutting chapters between the two eras. Nineties disaffected adolescents gather in "infoshops" to organize what they call "tests," events such as Reclaim-the-Parking-Lot that showcase reactions of the public, thus reinforcing who's in on the joke, irony, or sarcasm, and - most important to the organizers - who's out. Unlike their forebears, who were suspicious of technology and the media, these "testers" fearlessly use both as tools to ridicule the dominant culture. They sit in the safety of their parents' suburban houses behind their computers and hack their way into corporate websites to subvert products with alternative ad-campaigns, whereas their forebears followed their alienation physically into anti-war protests, sit-ins, and back-to-the-land communes.
Intercutting these two eras throughout the book is a brilliant device, and Spiotta clarifies their differences by embodying the most radical fringes of both in her characters. Mary and Bobby have gone into hiding after their 1972 bombings of Dow Chemical executives' ostensibly unoccupied vacation-homes goes awry and kills an innocent housekeeper. This pair is contrasted with Josh, who so effectively subverts corporate websites that he's hired by his chief nemesis, a huge pharmaceutical company, to create a gated-community fashioned on a wired version of utopia that is really a subtle system of consumer control. Josh is taken in by the irony of the outcome and the technological challenge of getting there. He thrives, as Mary and Bobby, forced by their underground existence to jettison each other and their entire past and to minimize their engagement with the present, shrivel before our eyes.
Spiotta is so gifted it's literally scary. The feeling of foreboding gathers as Mary spots her face on a wanted poster in yet another bar and flees in the middle of the night, hitching to another small town in another state where she dyes her hair a new color and changes her name. Mary is in a prison of her own vigilance, and we inadvertently root for her -despite the heinous act she committed - because she's a perpetual underdog. Her greatness of heart, which is apparent in her empathy for other trapped people, is the source of her undoing, what made her give her all to stop the Vietnam War. And so we are conflicted as we read, turning pages to find a way out of our own moral ambiguity.
