Image: Celadon Books
Of all the things to enjoy in Jean Hanff Korelitz s new mystery novel
The Plot, one of the best has to be one of the earliest, which is the encounter between Jacob Finch Bonner and his student Evan Parker (who intends his nom de plume to be Parker Evan ). These two cishet white male writers have brief literary fisticuffs during a class held for one Ripley College s low-residency MFA program.
Ripley, located in Vermont s Northeast Kingdom, is a waystation for Bonner, whose early success as a novelist has dried up and left him searching for places where he can simultaneously disappear from the powerful literati while maintaining the fiction that he s working on something new. He s so much a creature of his own imagination that even his middle name is an invention, taken in homage to his favorite novel,
âThe Plot,â by Jean Hanff Korelitz: An Excerpt
May 11, 2021
CHAPTER ONE
Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the âNew & Noteworthyâ
(The New York Times Book Review) novel
The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office heâd been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair. The office, his fourth home in Richard Peng Hall in as many years, was no great improvement on the earlier three, but at least it overlooked a vaguely collegiate walkway under trees from the window behind the desk, rather than the parking lot of years two and three or the dumpster of year one (when, ironically, heâd been much closer to the height of his literary fame, such as it was, and might conceivably have hoped for something nicer). The only thing in the room that signaled anything of an actual literary nature, that signaled anything of any warmth at al