Reviewed by Harriet
Sequels can be very enticing when the initial book has done well. Readers want to know what happens to a character they’ve connected with.
So says a literary agent in this witty, exciting thriller, which is itself of course the sequel to Korelitz’s previous novel, The Plot, which I reviewed on here back in 2021.
In that book Jacob Finch Bonner, a failing novelist, gets a job tutoring Writing students at a downmarket college in Vermont. Most of their work is predictably awful, but one them, the aloof, arrogant Evan Parker, shows Jake part of his planned novel, and Jake is blown away by it. The plot is stunning, unlike anything he’s read before, and he seethes with jealously. Two years later, he happens on an announcement that Parker has died without ever publishing the novel, and it doesn’t take Jake long to convince himself that he has a right to use the exceptional plot in a novel of his own. Huge success follows, but then he starts receiving emails from an anonymous person who knows exactly what he’s done, and his peace of mind is gone for good. Right at the end, much too late, he finds out the identity of his online pursuer.
I’m telling you all this because Korelitz’s new novel, The Sequel, is exactly what its title promises. The protagonist here is Anna Williams Bonner, Jake’s widow. Anna has ruthlessly jumped on the bandwagon of Jake’s posthumous fame and written a novel herself which, with the help of Jake’s agent and publisher, immediately hits the bestseller lists, and soon she’s touring the US doing signings and meeting excited fans. But Anna is far from what she seems. To say her past is murky is a huge understatement – even her name is not her own. And soon she’s in a remarkably, and frighteningly similar, situation to her dead husband, receiving scary anonymous messages threatening to reveal both Jake’s plagiarism and her own very serious misdemeanours. Believing she may know the identity of her pursuer, she sets out on a journey of discovery and ultimate revenge. But all does not go as planned, and she’s forced to carry out more and more searches and unthinkable (though not to her) acts of violence.
Korelitz has made a name for herself for writing sharp-eyed, witty satires of academic and literary life, and here she has fun with Anna’s reaction to her fellow aspiring novelists:
First of all, it wasn’t even that hard. The way they went on, all those writers, so incessantly, so dramatically, they might have been going down the mines on all fours with a plastic spoon clenched between their teeth to loosen the diamonds, or wading in raw sewage to find the leak in the septic line. … But this degree of whining over the mere act of sitting down at a desk, or even reclining on a sofa, and … typing?
Anna really is the ultimate anti-heroine. Nobody could possibly condone all the things she’s done in her past, more and more shocking details of which are revealed as the novel progresses, but most readers will probably find themselves rooting for her as she disposes of several rather depressingly petty adversaries who are promising to destroy her career and her life. I’ve seen her compared to Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, and given the fact that the college where Jake taught was called Ripley College, it’s not unlikely that Korelitz set out to create an equally amoral protagonist who somehow manages to gain the reader’s sympathy. That’s what she’s done for me, anyway.
Do you need to have read The Plot first? Obviously it’s a slight advantage, but this is a novel that definitely stands on its own. Will there be another one, making a trilogy? Given the ending, which I’m obviously not going to reveal, that seems possible. I shall be waiting impatiently to see.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.
Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel (Faber, 2024). 978-0571391226, 352pp., paperback original.
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