Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot and The Sequel

Four years ago, Jean Hanff Korelitz published The Plot, to near-universal acclaim. Now she’s followed up with The Sequel. Both are crime fiction in a sense, as murders take place and there are ample thrills. In these funny, knowing books, genre conventions and the distinctions between “literary” and “popular” fiction receive close scrutiny. Yet there is a sharp divide between the first novel, where a genuinely surprising mystery is revealed, and its continuation. The second novel is about the aftermath of events that have already occurred. There is still a puzzle to unravel, namely the identity and motives of an anonymous author of harassing notes, but it’s on a smaller scale than the previous big reveal.

To begin at the beginning, with The Plot. A creative writing instructor, at an undistinguished low-residency program, has suffered years of creative decline after the initial promise of his debut novel. Older and embittered, Jacob struggles to connect with his lacklustre colleagues and talentless but hopeful students. The most frustrating might be Evan, who, like Bartleby, “prefers not” to share his work in workshop. But in a private conference with his professor, Evan confides that he has the idea for a blockbuster plot.

Of course, Jacob is skeptical. How many people sidle up to writers at parties to insist that they have a stellar concept, but never actually sit down to write it? Apparently, though, Evan is the exception. His idea is so good that his professor appropriates it years later, when his own career has declined even more dismally, and after learning of Evan’s death due to a drug relapse. Jacob’s writing talent and Evan’s concept prove to be a winning combination, and Crib becomes a bestseller.

Hanff Korelitz provides a tantalizingly slow reveal of the novel’s plot, and the real-life events on which it is secretly based. Jumping to the end [spoilers ahead], Jacob does not get to savour the reception of his work for long. During a book tour where he is greeted rapturously by readers, he meets a radio show producer named Anna, and they fall in love. Then Anna kills him. Because her life story has been the fodder for her late brother’s fiction idea, the stolen plot that Jacob has used to ride to fame.

And it’s a doozy. Anna, it turns out, is not Anna. She’s an escapee of small-town Vermont, a resentful former teen mom with an acerbic and ultimately murderous approach to family life. “Anna” is a self-invention that required, along the way, murdering her daughter and assuming her identity. She could thus claim a university scholarship and jump-start the ambitions that were stymied by her daughter’s birth, years earlier, and her parents’ inexorable insistence that she suffer for her sins.

I enjoyed The Plot a great deal. Perhaps predictably, The Sequel is weaker, and the author anticipates this criticism in a very meta conversation about whether sequels are always worse than the original work. For me, the problem is that Anna is a baffling protagonist. Not because of the terrible acts she’s committed but because the third-person narration, while conveying the path that led her to those choices, remains oddly distant from her. She drifts. She allows herself to be directed by her agent and editor. Other than financial security and intense privacy, what does Anna really want? Garbo-esque solitude, but what else?

At the beginning of the novel, Anna is ostensibly a grieving widow, and she’s offered a consolatory opportunity for a writing residency at a Yaddo-like centre. To her surprise, after some days of napping and daydreaming she comes up with the concept for a book. The story is based, in part, on her experience of her marriage and recent loss. She has a real gift, and the manuscript is embraced by her late husband’s agent and editor.

It doesn’t rush to the top of the Times‘ Bestseller list, but it gets close. Anna has become an accomplished writer in her own right, and someone–in fact, a number of someones–are unhappy with her rapid and “unearned” ascent. She receives letters accusing Jacob of plagiarism, hinting at her collusion or responsibility to make amends. That’s alarming enough that she investigates, but she does not immediately identify the culprit. So she keeps looking.

Asked about how she developed her vocation as a writer, Anna is at a loss. Her first book just kind of came to her. This enrages all the would-be authors out there, the ones who linger at the end of the bookstore signing list to take her to task, or drop acid comments about her easy success. In my opinion, these are the most interesting scenes. The negotiation of acclaim that others have longed for, and sometimes worked for, for decades. Hanff Korelitz offers powerful evocations of apprentice writers’ resentment toward authors who have arrived safely within the gates of Literature.

There are some fun exchanges between Anna and her harried agent and editor, whose offices are deluged with unsolicited manuscripts. But long sections of the book are short on dramatic tension, the thing that characterized Jacob’s growing paranoid panic in The Plot. We got to know and understand Jacob, but Anna remains more of a mystery. However, there is one wonderful scene that will stick with me, and that’s Anna’s carefully curated interview with the New York Times‘ reporter.

She’s conscious that she must convey humility, gratitude for her publishing opportunity, love and respect for her late husband . . . none of which she actually feels. She’s note-perfect when she anticipates how her description of her writing routine (a cup of Constant Comment; the wooden table where her husband wrote his last book) will be translated into print, if she can keep the journalist on her side. Anna plays Anna perfectly. Hanff Korelitz also conjures up paragraphs of the Times profile perfectly, capturing the buoyant enthusiasm and admiration that the Magazine pieces often include, when they introduce new and exciting authors.

Speaking of writerly fame: Hanff Korelitz, as her name hints, is a cousin of Helene Hanff of 84, Charing Cross Road and several other books. A few years ago, Hanff Korelitz provided an insightful introduction for the re-issue of Hanff’s amusing Letter from New York. It’s a lovely edition, with cartoons by Bruce Eric Kaplan.