The Plot
Jacob Bonner is a writer whose career has run out of steam. Though he published a promising first novel, nothing he’s written since then has made an impact, and he’s reduced to teaching writing at a third-rate rural college in upstate Vermont.
One of his writing students, Evan Peters, declares that he doesn’t need to learn anything from Jacob. He has a plot that is guaranteed to succeed: it’s sure to be a bestseller that will make him rich and bring him instant fame as an author, with glowing reviews and interviews by Oprah.
At first, Jacob thinks Evan is simply blowing smoke, but Evan shows him his first chapter. It’s surprisingly well-written. Evan eventually tells Jacob the outline of his plot and Jacob realizes that Evan is right: it’s a sure-fire winner. He resigns himself to waiting to see Evan’s book explode on the publishing universe. When it’s published it’s sure to make a huge splash .
Two and a half years later, Jacob’s career has fallen even further. He’s still teaching but his courses have been reduced and he’s forced to work three jobs to stay afloat. All along, he’s been expecting Evan’s book to appear, but there’s been no mention. Checking online, he discovers that Evan died shortly after the workshop he took with Jacob, so he never had time to write the book.
Jacob decides Evan’s plot is too good to waste: he buckles down and writes a book of his own, using Evan’s plot. It quickly finds a publisher, and then everything that Evan expected happens. The book is an instant best-seller, and Jacob quickly becomes wealthy and famous. The book will soon be made into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg.
But then Jacob starts getting anonymous messages calling Jacob a “thief” and accusing him of stealing the novel. Jacob tries to keep the threats a secret, but they become more ominous and Jacob decides he has to go back to the Vermont town to investigate Evan’s background and find out who is threatening him.
The Plot is definitely a suspenseful page-turner. It’s also a layered novel, told on several levels (including excerpts from the fictional novel). In fact the real book has experienced much of the promise of the fictional novel—when The Plot appeared in May 2021, it became an instant New York Times best-seller, with Stephen King calling it “insanely readable” and Jimmy Fallon interviewing the author on The Tonight Show.
The Plot is not Jean Hanff Korelitz’s first book; in fact, it’s her seventh. Her 2014 novel, You Should Have Known, was adapted for HBO as “The Undoing”, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland. Admission, published in 2009, was adapted in 2013 as a film of the same name starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin and Paul Rudd.
When Korelitz began writing The Plot during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, she had already been working on another novel. After interrupting that work to finish The Plot, she finished the original one: it will be published in May 2022, titled The Latecomer.
She was born in 1961 to Jewish parents in New York City and grew up there. She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in English, followed by studies at Cambridge University in England. She is married to an award-winning Irish poet, Paul Muldoon; they have two children, now grown, and live in New York.
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