The Plot

By Jean Hanff Korelitz, Celedon Books, 2021, 220 pages

I didn’t much like Jacob Finch Bonner, protagonist of “The Plot,” in the opening chapters. He is a lazy, mostly washed-up novelist who isn’t giving his best to teaching at Ripley, a third-rate fiction-writing program.

I liked even less Evan Parker, Jake’s arrogant, mean, swaggering student. But the plot in Parker’s fledgling novel is killer. He says he has a “sure thing,” but could this former druggie and jackass tavern owner even write a novel?

Jake couldn’t see Parker making the grade, and he certainly couldn’t coach a student who had no use for the writing process, no listening skills and no willingness to be edited.

But not long after the Ripley program ends, Jake learns that Parker is dead from a drug overdose. He knows enough about Parker’s plot to lust for it, to fixate on its possibilities and to steal it. Sure, he had a moral dilemma and internal debate about taking the plot, but Parker is no longer around. And Jake is the one who actually writes the book, which he titles “Crib,” and develops the characters, so what’s the problem?

He soon finds out. The book is a huge success; he’s talking to Steven Spielberg about film rights; he’s on tours; he has an apartment in West Village, lower Manhattan; he is wealthy and well-known. And, even better, he falls in love with Anna Williams while on tour in Seattle.

(Though based in New York, the novel’s references from the book tour and the woman he falls in love with are a plus for us Washington readers. Anna went to the University of Washington. Jake signs books at Elliot Bay Book Company, and the couple names their cat “Whidbey,” for example.)

Then, of course, everything goes to hell.

“You are a thief,” says the chilling email that arrives in his inbox while he is on his way from downtown Seattle to Sea-Tac for the next leg of a national tour.

Just who is this TalentedTom@gmail.com? What does he want? How much does he know? What’s he going to do?

From there, the story becomes a novel within a novel. Chapters of Jake’s published work, “Crib,” are worked into the narrative of Korelitz’ “The Plot.” Is stealing a plot (but not the writing) the crime TalentedTom is making it out to be? Who owns this plot? That’s the threshold question.

I don’t want to give anything away. (Hey, which plot? The plot of Korelitz’ novel or the plot and outcome of Jake/Parker’s work?)

Never mind that I figured out who is behind the mental anguish halfway through.

Did I come to like Jake? Not really. He did steal someone’s story. But he underwent such psychological suffering and fear that I began to feel sorry for him as the lies and deceit gnawed at his miserable existence.

Did I like the perp, the TalentedTom character, who is indeed wronged by the theft? For a while, yes. But no one should treat another human being with such cruelty. And Jake wasn’t the only target of this Tom character’s malevolence through the years.

Anyway, whom I liked is irrelevant. Read the book. Decide for yourself which, if any, character is worthy of your empathy.