ANOTHER EAT THE DOCUMENT

I was catching up on my reading backlog of the London Review of Books on a train the other day (I've reached the June issues now), and from one of these I learnt of the existence of a novel by a Dana Spiotta, published in April, titled Eat The Document. (London: Picador, 290pp, £12.99).

It's loosely based on a true story but is emphatically fiction, about disappearing from your own life after committing a crime, and when choosing a new name, making sure it has no meaning for you from your old life: "...there was no point being witty about any of this, encoding it or making it coherent in any way... if it is legible to you, then it gives you away."

I don't know how much music the book mentions, but the review cites several deployments of the Beach Boys, one of Arthur Lee's Love; Funkadelic's Maggot Brain; and the Kinks.

Aptly, Dana Spiotta (first novel Lightning Field, 2001) was born in 1966.