Jacob Finch Bonner is a once-promising novelist who has fallen on times so hard he is teaching at a nothing of an MFA program in Nowhere, Vermont. The literary world has forgotten him and his agent doesn’t even bother asking about his so-called work in progress anymore. Most of his students haven’t read his book or even heard of him. Jacob is quite confident none of them will be even as modestly successful as he was, until Evan Parker walks into class. Rude and off-putting, Parker makes no bones about declaring himself a future best-selling author.
What’s got Parker confidently planning his appearance on Oprah is not the quality of his prose, but rather the infallibility of his plot. Parker is convinced that he’s got a can’t-miss story idea on his hands, and all he has to do is get it finished and wait for the checks to cash in. Jacob can’t believe that someone in his class could be so confident in his work, but when Evan shows him a few pages and describes the story he has in mind Jacob has to admit that he’s probably right.
A few years later, Jacob recalls Parker and realizes that the book he was writing never materialized. A Google search leads to a bare-bones obituary and sparks a crisis of conscience in Jacob. Can he really let such a good plot go to waste?
When the novel is published, Jacob instantly starts living the life he had dreamed about. He tours the country giving readings to sold-out rooms, signing copies until his arms get sore, and waiting for Steven Spielberg to finish his film adaptation. On one stop on his book tour he even meets a beautiful woman who eventually becomes his wife. But not everything is coming up roses. Someone knows what he’s done, and is making threats.
Author Jean Hanff Korelitz sets herself a difficult task by hyping up the plot of the novel-within-the-novel to such an absurd degree. At first, I worried that Korelitz would take the easy way out by never directly revealing the magic bullet of a plot, but she not only reveals it, she includes a few excerpts of the novel in question. It’s a brave attempt, but no storyline could live up to the hype, and her own invention is no exception. But Korelitz has some other tricks up her sleeve as well.
The Plot was a curious read, in that I very much wanted to get through it quickly for two distinct and divergent reasons. One, I really wanted to know what was going to happen next. This of course is for many people the be-all, end-all of fiction writing. If a writer can get you to keep reading, and to care about what happens, then it must be a good book, right? Well, the second reason I wanted to get through it quickly was because I didn’t like it at all and wanted to get it over with. The whole story is ridiculous from start to finish, hampered especially by an epic unresolvable plot hole right at the center of the novel. There is no reason for Evan Parker to tell Jacob the whole plot he has in mind, and yet he does, just as a contrivance.
It may or may not be to Korelitz’s credit that the ending of the novel was so affecting. After all, authors are trying to evoke an emotional response from their readers. However, I don’t know that my anger and frustration are what Korelitz was looking for. I raced through the book’s final pages with something akin to mounting horror and genuine revulsion. If that’s what Korelitz wanted, job well done.
