The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz (2021) (read in 2022)

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a kind of a meta-plot-twist book: it’s a book with multiple pretty inventive plot twists about an author who becomes famous for having written a book with a nearly shockingly inventive and unique plot twist.

Jacob Finch Bonner is an author who stormed out of the gate, more or less, with a highly critically acclaimed first novel that never landed on the NYT best-seller list, but garnered a few industry awards that left everyone waiting for his next book. He takes a swipe at it, but fails utterly, selling only a few hundred copies. His agent doesn’t give up, but it looks grim.

The next few years are tough, as he parlays his initial fame into a living of sorts, working at writer’s retreats. he kinda sorta genuinely tries to help, but he can barely hide his contempt for them, for his peers, and for himself. So it’s years later and he’s dragging around a laptop with the corpse of his never-published third book and the desperate scraps that make up what he would only the most desperate and hopeful person could even call something that might become his fourth book.

He’s a pretty sad dude until, at one of these writer’s retreats, he meets an arrogant young man whose confidence in his own completely unproven abilities rest upon his having thought of the most amazing plot for a book. He shares a few pages with Jacob, who deems the writing style surprisingly solid, though not stellar.

The young man spills the rest of his plot in order to prove to Jacob that he really will be unstoppable. After having heard the plot, Jacob can’t disagree, grinding his teeth in his mind at the absolute injustice of such a brilliant plot having found its way into the head of a hack like that young man when an author of more stature and talent like Jacob would have been a much more-deserving target.

A few more years pass, during which Jacob spirals more, never publishing again. He eventually looks up the young man and discovers that he’d died of a drug overdose scant months after their interaction at the retreat. It doesn’t take long before Jacob convinces himself that it would be unfair to the amazing story to never let it fly free.

Cut to a year later. Jacob is a world-famous author, having written Crib, which, as predicted by its progenitor, blew through all of the bestseller lists, got a top-flight movie option with Spielberg, and otherwise put the author’s star into the firmament. He’s enjoying a busy schedule and his rich lifestyle when, on a book-tour stop, he meets an amazing woman whose personality fits with his perfectly.

They start long-distance dating and he finds himself falling in love—his life is totally working out. And then he gets a message, “I know what you did.” He’s an incredibly insecure person so, instead of ignoring it, he lets it eat at him. His productivity drops, he starts going a bit crazy, and his relationship suffers. She’s there with him, even though he doesn’t tell her what’s going on.

The messages continue occasionally. He proposes marriage. He manages to finish his follow-up book, cementing his career and his fortune. Another message arrives, threatening to blow everything out in the open.

He takes to the road to investigate what had happened to his old student. He finds out that he’d died under suspicious circumstances. He finds out that the young man’s sister had been an odd duck, and had had a very clever, if not brilliant daughter, who’d been kept shut up in their home with her mother, who’d had her when she was very young—and very brilliant herself. Bitter that her life had been wasted, she was determined to not let her daughter breathe.

Jacob finds out that the daughter had applied to university against her mother’s wishes—and had been accepted. The mother offers to drive with her daughter to college, taking a trip together. He find out that the mother had died in a mysterious tent fire at a campsite. He finds out that maybe it was the daughter who’d died, and the brilliant mother who’d taken her daughter’s place at the university to which they were headed. Yup, that’s what happened. The mother killed her daughter and took her place. Then she killed her brother with a fake drug overdose to make sure that he wouldn’t write the book he’d been trumpeting about to his seminar teacher.

And then, when Jacob ended up writing the book anyway, she finagled a cute-meet on a book tour, and made him fall in love and marry her. Once he’d published his second bestseller—but especially once he thought he’d figured out the story, although he didn’t at all suspect that it was his wife—she didn’t need him anymore, so she poisoned him slowly, letting him know what was happening. She then goes on a tour herself, reminiscing about her late husband.

Part of the allure of this book for me (and likely for the friend who recommended it) is that a large part of it takes part in upstate and central New York State. The book is well-written and contains both interesting thoughts on being a writer as well as snippets of Jake’s novel Crib interspersed throughout, so it really goes hard on the meta thing—but it pulls it off, I think.

Citations

Are you sure it’s the right one? Is there a picture?

Literally every book anchors this Russiagate fiction further into reality. Incredible.