Eat the Document Dana Spiotta Picador, 290pp, £12.99

Shifting between the 1970s and the 1990s, Dana Spiotta's second novel explores the anti-establishment cultures of two generations. Mary Whittaker and Bobby DeSoto, a young activist couple, are forced to part ways and adopt new identities after an anti-Vietnam war protest goes horribly wrong. Mary spends the 1970s under a series of assumed names in various locations.

Twenty years later, she is living with her 15-year-old son, and with no idea what happened to Bobby. Anti-establishment feeling is thriving in the city around her, but it has little in common with the idealistic rebellion of her youth.

It is the comparison of counter-cultures, rather than Mary's life story, that gives Eat the Document its bite. The violent protest Mary and Bobby organise is naive and dangerous, but it's also a well-meaning attempt to achieve something. By contrast, the rebellious gestures of the 1990s include a series of subversive websites so well designed that the corporation being lampooned gives their creator a job.

Of course, the activists of the 1970s, for all their optimism, didn't curtail the Vietnam war,

and Mary and Bobby manage to destroy their own lives trying. But Spiotta makes a convincing and elegantly written case for the value of good intentions.

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