I believe it was John Updike who remarked that two terrible things can happen to a writer: She can fail. Or she can succeed.
Jacob Finch Bonner, the writer-protagonist of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s best-selling (a New York Times bestseller!) novel The Plot begins the book as a failure, writes a runaway best-seller and becomes a towering success. It does not go well.
“Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written―let alone published―anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.
“Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that―a story that absolutely needs to be told.
“In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.”
Korelitz has nailed the writing biz. The wannabe writers who attend MFA programs and writer’s conferences. The disappointing second book. The unpublishable third book. Then, shazam! A blockbuster! The twenty-city book tours with a minder from the publisher. Taking a meeting with a famous movie director and an interview with Oprah. Fans lined up at book signing events. One can only dream.
The worm in the bud, of course, is Jake’s original transgression and it raises an interesting question: Is there such a thing as an original plot? Apparently, you cannot copyright a plot any more than you can copyright a title, a recipe, or an idea. There is plagiarism, of course, and that is a clear no-no.
But is it stealing to use the framework of a story on which to hang your own characters, their thoughts, motivations, and actions? When does appropriation cross a line into illegal, immoral, or fattening?
Nevertheless, Jake feels guilty as sin, and the anonymous You are a thief message starts him careening toward disaster. I became impatient with him because he becomes such a liar. But if he didn’t there wouldn’t be a book. Or not this book.
He could have said something like, “My book is based on a story a former student once told me,” and avoided a mess of trouble. As Korelitz writes, “Stories, of course, are common as dirt. Everyone has one, if not an infinity of them, and they surround us at all times whether we acknowledge them or not. Stories are the wells we dip into to be reminded of who we are, and the ways we reassure ourselves that, however obscure we may appear to others, we are actually important, even crucial, to the ongoing drama of survival: personal, societal, and even as a species.”
Late in the book, Jake talks about a story’s theft, migration, or appropriation. “In my world,” he says, “the migration of a story is something we recognize, and we respect. Works of art can overlap, or they can sort of chime with one another. Right now, with some of the anxieties we have around appropriation, it’s become downright combustible, but I’ve always thought there was a kind of beauty to it, the way narratives get told and retold.”
Insights like these (and there are more) set The Plot apart from other mysteries. Writers and wannabe writers especially will enjoy Jake’s struggles and triumph in his chosen career. I have only one caution to readers: Don’t assume you’ve figured it out too soon.
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