Fast-paced, twisty mystery

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This fast-paced, twisty mystery helped break me out of a months-long reading slump; I raced through the book. I really admired Korelitz’s voice and style in this novel, which was lively and immediately familiar. Prose that is sometimes heavy on style can feel like a barrier to the reader, and I was pleased to realize, as I found myself turning page after page late in the night, that while The Plot had flashes of atmosphere and careful tension-building, those touches were never distracting from the core of the story.

Which was, of course, the provenance of “The Plot” – an unbeatable, sure-thing of a plot to a novel, so compelling that it was guaranteed to be a bestseller once written. Jacob Finch Bonner, the writer at the center of the story, hears about the plot from one of his MFA students, and when he finds out a few years that his student had died without ever finishing his work, he takes the story and writes a novel. It becomes the bestseller that Bonner knew it would be, but soon thereafter, he starts to be blackmailed by someone calling him a thief. This kicks off the second half of the novel, where Bonner turns detective and tries, in increasingly outlandish and desperate fashion, to figure out the source of the threats.

Korelitz includes excerpts from Bonner’s novel, Crib, in her book, and although the “book-within-a-book” move is somewhat cliched, I enjoyed the excerpts and they helped heighten the mystery at the center of the novel: where did the inspiration for The Plot come from?

I don’t think it’s prudent to say more, but I will say that I found some of the twists/reveals obvious and heavily hinted at. I’m not sure if this is part of Korelitz’s meta commentary on writers and writing, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book.