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Book Review — ‘The Plot’
How much trouble can you get into by stealing another writer’s idea? An author finds out the hard way in a thriller.
An elegant writer can keep you interested in an inelegant plot. Jean Hanff Korelitz largely pulls it off in a novel that melds several genres: thriller, academic satire, roman à clef, and literary homage — in this case, to Patricia Highsmith’s psychopathic killer, Tom Ripley.
Korelitz is a writer who can describe a high school student’s pregnancy as “the blastocyst inches south of her navel,” and her nimble perceptions offset some of the limits of her story. The pieces of her plot snap together like Lego bricks that don’t quite live up to the vibrant image on the box, and they include throwaway references to real-life figures easily decrypted by readers of Page Six or New York magazine’s Vulture blog.
The anti-hero of The Plot is the once-promising novelist Jacob Finch Bonner (think: the biblical Jacob and Harper Lee’s Atticus). Broke and spurned by publishers, Jake earns a living by teaching in the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program at the borderline skanky Ripley College in northern Vermont.
Ripley panders to the vanities of would-be writers who are short on talent but long on money to blow on a potentially worthless degree…
