The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz Review

Jacob Finch Bonner, a once promising novelist whose career has now flatlined, is resigned to being a humble writing teacher. Then he meets a cocky student convinced that he has a can’t-fail novelistic plot that’ll make him rich and famous. Jake reads a fragment of the novel but hears the plot in full during their only one-to-one. Years pass, and Jake learns that his student never did write his incredible novel - because he died mere months after telling Jake the full story. Jake decides to realise his student’s plot but without crediting him - which does in fact finally make Jake a bestselling author. Except now he’s getting messages from a mysterious person online threatening to expose Jake’s theft to the world. Who is this person and how do they know his secret? The plot unfolds…

Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is weirdly the second novel of a washed-up writer stealing a dead person’s story I’ve read in as many months! And like Rebecca Kuang’s Yellowface, The Plot isn’t bad though it definitely has its flaws.

For a novel called The Plot, it ironically takes nearly 100 pages (1/3 of the book) to get to it! Not that it’s so bad to read up to that point, but I feel like the premise could’ve gotten going a fair bit quicker. Kuang managed it by the end of chapter one in Yellowface.

There are excerpts of Jake’s novel Crib interspersed between the chapters proper from this point on until the end, and these were easily the worst parts of the book. I just don’t buy that Crib was this phenom in the world of the novel when these excerpts are so boring and the twist that apparently blew everyone’s hair back really wasn’t that shocking.

The argument about theft is much less clear-cut here than in Yellowface too - in Kuang’s novel, the protagonist literally steals a completed first draft manuscript, whereas Jake relies only upon the memory of what his student told him years ago. He doesn’t even retain the pages he read, or try to replicate them in his version. In that way, it’s less convincing that Jake is a thief - I’ve always believed when it comes to narrative art that the telling is more important than the concept. Numerous versions of Hamlet existed before Shakespeare’s but it’s his version that’s stood the test of time because of the way he told it. There’s no reason to believe a first-time writer would’ve had the skills required to turn a supposedly-ingenious plot into a great novel.

The excerpts and Jake’s romance with Anna were the least interesting parts of the novel, but once you realise that Korelitz isn’t being gratuitous and that they all have a part to play, it makes sense. Couple this with her love of double-entendres - Crib as in mother/daughter, but also as in to copy; the school Jake teaches at is called Ripley and his blackmailer is called TalentedTom, both nods to Patricia Highsmith’s most famous creation; plot as in the plot of a novel, murder plots, a grave plot - and she ends up showing her hand a bit too early.

Because about 2/3rds of the way through, I knew who the blackmailer was. The excerpts in Crib are a giveaway, the not-so-subtle hints between the mother and daughter foreshadow heavily what’s going to happen between them, and once you realise a twist ending will also close The Plot as it did in Crib, and that a satisfying twist ending can only come from characters we’ve spent the majority of a story with, and the cast list of this novel is quite small, it’s really obvious.

I think even if I hadn’t guessed - correctly as it turned out - who TalentedTom was, the final 100 pages would’ve still been flat. Jake runs about chasing up clues, none of which are especially riveting scenes, underlining that Korelitz’s story has run out of steam long before the end. Add to that the villain monologuing their motivations, etc. in a hammy way and Korelitz has the same issue as Kuang in Yellowface, falling back on cliched melodrama to finish her story. It’s a very weak and tedious final act.

But she has a real knack for hooking the reader. The premise is solid, she’s great at characterisation, insightful on the writing process and, to an extent, the publishing industry, the prose is excellent, and I did want to see what was going to happen next. Up to about the 2/3rds mark I was really into it, and then for the final third I was just waiting to see if I was right. And: she’s written a sequel, brilliantly titled The Sequel, which I now want to read if only to find out how could there be a sequel?! So Korelitz is doing enough things right and I can see why she’s had a successful writing career.

The Plot is slow to get going, slow to wrap up, but has a solid middle, with good writing throughout, an intriguing premise, strong characterisation across the board, and a mystery good enough to keep you chugging along to the end, even if it’s easy to predict past a certain point. Flawed but undeniably compelling, I enjoyed The Plot well enough to go and check out The Sequel!