Blaine's Reviews > The Plot

2024 update:
I decided to reread The Plot to get ready for the soon-to-be-released sequel, appropriately titled … The Sequel. This book holds up really well, even when you know what’s going to happen. The book-within-a-book technique—almost required given the story—is still very effective. My only real critique remains that Jake probably should have figured out what was going on faster than he did. And the ending is still really good. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5. Highly recommended.

Original review:

But there was one thing he actually did believe in that bordered on the magical, or at least the beyond-pedestrian, and that was the duty a writer owed to a story.

I received a free ARC of The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz from Macmillan in an exchange for an honest review.

All Jacob Finch Bonner wanted to be was a writer. He paid his dues, and when his first novel made a modest splash in the literary fiction market, he thought he was on his way. But then his second novel tanked. And he couldn’t even find a publisher for his third or fourth novels. Which is how he found himself teaching at “a third-rate MFA program that nobody—not even its own faculty—took seriously.”

Evan Parker doesn’t have any particular respect for writing or writers. “I just care about the story. Either it’s a good plot or it isn’t. And if it’s not a good plot, the best writing isn’t going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn’t going to hurt it.” But what he has is a bulletproof plot for a novel that will be the next mega-hit, one of those that come along once or twice a decade and explode: Presumed Innocent, The Firm, The Da Vinci Code, Gone Girl. As much as Jake detests Evan, when he hears the plot, he knows Evan is right.

But the novel never gets published, and when Jake finally digs into why, he learns that Evan died just a few months after they met. And Jake decides that the plot is simply too extraordinary not to be written. So he takes the plot, writes his own novel (he had only seen a few pages of Evan’s first draft), and it becomes the Oprah-loved, Spielberg-movie, multi-million copy selling smash that he could have only dreamed of. And his life is pretty perfect, until the first e-mail arrives accusing him of being a thief... because maybe there was more to Evan’s plot than Jake ever realized.

I had a lot of thoughts as I read The Plot. Jake rationalizes using Evan’s plot, yet upon being accused of being a thief, he feels and acts guilty. But is he? Certainly you can steal the text of a novel, but that didn’t happen here. Can you steal an idea or a plot? And if he was really worried, why didn’t he just dedicate the novel to Evan, and say that he’d done his best to honor the idea that Evan had told him? Maybe I just don’t know enough about plagiarism. But I’m 100% sure that Evan is 100% wrong that that a good plot can’t be ruined by bad writing. Let 1,000 people read one of those books I listed above, then give them a year to write their own version of that book from memory, and I’ll bet you couldn’t get through the first three chapters of at least 90% of the copies. Writing is hard, and a successful book works because of the marriage between the story, the writing, and the times.

But I eventually stopped thinking so much about those ideas, and became absorbed with the story itself. Jake is a well-developed character, and his insights into the world of being a writer were entertaining. The book-within-a-book technique—almost required given the story—is very effective. As Jake begins to learn more about Evan’s past, we get snippets from Crib, and each unsurprisingly sheds new light on the other. In fact, my only real critique of the book is that, given that he already knew the plot of his own book, Jake probably should have figured out what was going on faster than he did.

So could the The Plot be the next mega-hit? It has all of the ingredients. It’s got a good plot with some nice twists, is well-written, has some interesting ideas going on, and seems primed to appeal to those in the grip of the current obsession for mystery thrillers. Perhaps most of all, the book builds to a legitimately great ending that I may never forget. Highly recommended.

5/11/2021 update: reposting my review to celebrate that today is publication day!