The Plot

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz is more than a page-turning who done it.

The author who wrote The Undoing, which was dramatised on television with Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman in the leading roles, lampoons the writers world of creative writing, publishing and best sellers.

The central character of The Plot is Jacob Finch Bonner, an unsuccessful writer, who teaches creative writing at Ripley College.

He has one fairly obnoxious course member called Evan Parker. Parker dies and Bonner plagiarises his submitted story which becomes a bestseller.

He is then trolled by someone who knows this. The story now begins to become less credible as Bonner undertakes his own investigation to locate and to identify his  harasser.

I worked out who it must be – not out of any detective work on clues – but I have read this type of novel enough times to know it normally has to have a massive twist at the end.

The problem is (without giving a spoiler) that there are clear flaws in the plot development which are necessary to give tension but at the end made this reader a tad cynical.

The author’s gift for characterisation of the people Bonner questions in his investigation and the description of the writing world lift the novel beyond the level of an airport bookshop pulp novel … but only just.