Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta

This book was recommended to me by an enthusiastic reader of fiction.

I found it original and refreshing and truthfully, a little opaque.  The review I read in Entertainment Weekly after I finished the novel helped me to understand that love of cinema is a theme that runs through the novel
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I thought it merited description as a novel about the way we live now, and about the tension between art and morality, but it is not comforting fiction.  It is also about friendship.  Spiotta captures the complex dynamic between two friends who are as different and as close as Carrie and Meadow -- sometimes competitive, sometimes judgmental and impatient but nevertheless striving to be loyal, caring and supportive.

Carrie and Meadow are filmmakers and lifelong best friends.  Meadow creates documentaries that offer a fresh perspective on topics such as the Kent State shootings. Carrie's work is more conventional.

Amy, whose nickname is Jelly, is a woman who engages in what the author calls, in her "Acknowledgements," as "proto-'catfishing'".  She calls men in the movie industry and talks to them about their work and other topics.  She calls herself Nicole in these phone calls, and she starts them by pretending it's a wrong number.  She loves these conversations and they are thoughtful conversations, but ones in which she is manipulating the person on the other end to be increasingly interested in her.  Spiotta describes how Jelly sits while she's talking on the phone, how she arranges herself to be comfortable or changes position while she's talking on the phone.

Spiotta's last book, Stone Arabia, was a finalist for the National Book Book Critics Circle Award.