Excuse Me While I Steal Your Book Idea and Get Famous - The New York Times

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Jean Hanff Korelitz’s “The Plot” is an addictive Russian nesting doll of a novel where every character’s hand fits neatly into someone else’s pocket.

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of seven novels for adults, including “The Devil and Webster,” “Admission” and “You Should Have Known,” which inspired the HBO mini-series “The Undoing.”

Welcome to Group Text, a monthly column for readers and book clubs about the novels, memoirs and short-story collections that make you want to talk, ask questions and dwell in another world for a little bit longer.

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A struggling writer steals a plot from a student and his life changes overnight. Suddenly, he’s the toast of the literary community and a household name. But someone knows what he did — and wants revenge.

“The Plot” has a tantalizing quandary at its core: Who owns a story? Should one man’s life unravel if he helped himself to a yarn that belonged to someone else? Especially if that person never spun it into anything and is now dead?

If you’re a person who harbors notions about the glamour of the writing life, THE PLOT (Celadon, 336 pp., $28) will jettison them to the deepest, darkest trench of the ocean floor. If you’re a novelist who has endured the humiliation of a reading with no audience, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s latest novel will help you laugh about the empty room. And if you’re a reader who likes stories where a terrible decision snowballs out of control, this book is just what the librarian ordered. Welcome to a spectacular avalanche.

Jacob Finch Bonner is a washed-up golden boy novelist when a floppy-haired student named Evan Parker turns up in his graduate-level writing class at Ripley College in Vermont. (Picture the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference housed in a cinder-block mausoleum instead of a yellow barn.) Parker informs his teacher and classmates that he has a surefire best seller up his sleeve — one that will land him a film deal, a spot on Oprah’s couch and “all the brass rings.”

“This story will be read by everybody,” Evan brags. “It will make a fortune.” He’s even considering adopting a nom de plume for the sake of privacy. As his instructor wryly observes, “For most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.”

Jake isn’t dazzled by an excerpt from Parker’s book, but when the young man regales the class with the basics of the story, it makes an impression. Two and a half years later, still down on his luck and now clinging to the outermost fringes of the literary world, Jake learns that Evan Parker overdosed before completing his masterpiece.

So Jake Bonner borrows the basics of the plot — a simple (or so it seems) mother-daughter saga — and writes the novel himself. When “Crib” comes out, accolades rain down on our semi-deserving protagonist. Jake becomes a New York Times best seller; his events sell out 2,400-seat theaters; his paperback receives the most coveted of book club benedictions (no, not this one). Jake is en route to Los Angeles to meet with an A-list director, having just shared coffee with a potential love interest, when he receives a four-word email that brings his victory lap to a grinding halt. It says, “You are a thief.”

At first, Jake ignores a string of increasingly threatening dispatches. But then “Talented Tom” (as the harasser calls himself, evoking “The Talented Mr. Ripley”) takes to Twitter, contacts Jake’s publisher and sends a letter to his home. By this point, we’ve watched Jake progress from an apartment on aptly named Poverty Lane to Manhattan’s West Village, where he finally has a real home (and a cat); and, I have to admit, we’re rooting for the guy. We’ve looked past his self-involvement and toxic pride, not a hard thing to do. Now we start to wonder if our loyalty is misplaced. Did Jake earn his new life or is it all just stolen finery?

Korelitz tells us that Jake “had not taken one single word from those pages he’d read back at Ripley.” But, ever since he’d typed “Chapter One” into his laptop, “he’d been waiting, horribly waiting, for someone who knew the answer to this very question — How’d you come up with it? — to rise to their feet and point their finger in accusation.”

Jake’s search for Talented Tom takes him on a cat-and-mouse odyssey from Vermont to Georgia, from a local tavern to a lawyer’s office to a creepy campground and a graveyard. His detective instincts are so spot on, I started to wonder if he might have a second career as a sleuth.

I won’t spoil the ending. But, as a longtime fan of Korelitz’s novels (including “You Should Have Known,” which was made into HBO’s “The Undoing”), I will say that I think “The Plot” is her gutsiest, most consequential book yet. It keeps you guessing and wondering, and also keeps you thinking: about ambition, fame and the nature of intellectual property (the analog kind). Are there a finite number of stories? Is there a statute of limitations on ownership of unused ideas? These weighty questions mingle with a love story, a mystery and a striver’s journey — three of the most satisfying flavors of fiction out there.

Jake Bonner’s insecurity, vulnerability and fear are familiar to those of us who have faced a blank screen, wondering how or whether we’ll be able to scramble letters into a story. Korelitz takes these creative hindrances and turns them into entertainment. Not only does she make it look easy, she keeps us guessing until the very end.

Discussion Questions

What were your thoughts on the chapters from “Crib”? (It took me a while to get my bearings but once I did I wanted to read the whole book.)
That ending! Did you see it coming? Did we meet anyone along the way who might have understood what happened?