The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz — borrowed time

The Plot is a literary thriller in two important ways. First, it’s fun for people who like in-jokes about publishing, the insecurities of authors, and terrible creative writing programmes at small US colleges. It’s also a twisty page-turner (yes, I stayed up nearly all night to finish it) built on the disputed ownership of a novel, or at least the plot of one.

Our protagonist in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel (hero is perhaps too strong a word) is Jacob “Jake” Finch Bonner, a man in love with the idea of writing fiction, but weaker on the execution of it. Such was his early determination to be a great writer that he added the “Finch” in his name as a teenager, as a “homage to the novel which awakened his love of fiction”.

Deliciously, Bonner is introduced to the reader as “the once promising author of the ‘New & Noteworthy’ (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder”.

When The Plot opens in 2012, that early promise has faded and Bonner has been exiled from New York to Ripley College, in a rainy bit of Vermont, where he is teaching mature students in a lower-division Master of Fine Arts creative writing course. They are all destined to fail.

Hanff Korelitz, a veteran of the literary and academic scenes herself, knows how to make them acutely funny. “His workshop contained not one but two women who cited Elizabeth Gilbert [author of the wildly successful Eat, Pray, Love] as their inspiration.”

Among Bonner’s students is a “narcissistic jerkoff”, Evan Parker, who has a plot for a book all worked out and asserts confidently: “Like, Oprah will pick it for her book thing. It will be talked about on TV shows . . . This book, there’s no way it can fail.”

Bonner is sceptical but once Parker gives him a verbal summary of the plot, he has to agree. “It was new to him, as it would be new to every single person who read it, and that was going to be a lot of people.” At this stage readers are teased with the originality of Parker’s tale. All that we (and Bonner) can see are a few pages of manuscript about an unhappy mother and daughter trapped in mutual resentment.

This is Hanff Korelitz’s seventh adult novel, and one that would play brilliantly on screen

Some years later, Bonner — now the manager of a hotel reinvented as an artists’ colony — is out of ideas and out of luck. Then he discovers that Parker died in 2013, shortly after the Ripley course. That brilliant plot is unused. So Bonner writes the book, justifying to himself that “he would hardly be the first to take some tale from a play or a book — in this case a book that had never been written!”

This is Hanff Korelitz’s seventh adult novel, and one that would play brilliantly on screen. She has form here: Admission (2009) about a moral dilemma facing an Ivy League admissions officer, was adapted into a 2013 film starring Tina Fey. More recently, You Should Have Known (2014) was adapted for television as the lockdown HBO hit The Undoing.

As The Plot progresses, extracts from Bonner’s multimillion-selling 2017 novel Crib appear as another layer to the narrative. In the reworking of Parker’s idea, Crib is the story of Samantha, a brilliant student who gets pregnant at 15 and the daughter, Maria, she unwillingly raises while working menial jobs. It is Maria’s destiny to have the glittering college career that Samantha was denied.

Now we follow Bonner into his new life: “Audiences, stacks of books, that magical ‘1’ beside his name on the fabled list at the back of the New York Times Book Review.” Bonner can’t enjoy his success, though, because of fear that he will be found out as a (sort of) plagiarist.

Sure enough, someone calling themselves “TalentedTom” (the “Ripley” reference is not lost on Bonner) starts sending emails and social media messages. “Blindsided by that big twist in Crib? Here’s another one: Jacob Finch Bonner stole his novel from another writer.”

The brilliant twist in the plot is, it turns out, not fiction at all

On a visit to Parker’s hometown, Bonner realises his mistake. “This had been a far more intimate theft: not Jake’s at all but one Evan Parker himself had committed.” The brilliant twist in the plot is, it turns out, not fiction at all. To say much more would risk spoilers, but Bonner’s life becomes a cross-country quest to uncover the real events behind Parker’s storyline, while trying not to ruin his relationship with his new wife, Anna.

Hanff Korelitz is often ahead of the curve with her themes — her last book, 2017’s The Devil and Webster, is a pre-#MeToo, pre-Black Lives Matter tale that centres on a liberal college principal struggling with student activists who threaten to undermine her reputation, while recognising their fervour as something she once shared.

The Plot is one of a handful of novels this year — including Chris Power’s A Lonely Man and Sam Riviere’s Dead Souls — to probe the moral grey areas around plagiarism. If Hanff Korelitz’s record continues, her book may herald a new age of reckonings with plot “borrowing” and accusations that authors appropriate others’ real lives. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn murderous.

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, Faber £8.99/Celadon Books $28, 336 pages

Isabel Berwick is the FT’s work and careers editor

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