Did you read The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz and need a plot (ha!) summary or want to discuss the book with someone who has read it? Here’s my Spoiler Discussion for The Plot
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Published by Celadon Books on May 11, 2021.
Thanks to the publisher for the advance copy for review. This post will contain affiliate links.
Spoiler Discussion of the Plot – Table of Contents
Plot Summary for The Plot: Jacob’s Narrative
Synopsis: The Crib by Jacob Bonner – the story within the story. This is Jacob’s fictionalization.
Spoiler Discussion for The Plot
Added in April 2023: Movie News: The Plot is Coming to Hulu!
Plot Synopsis for The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz: Jacob’s Narrative
Jacob Bonner is a writer who published a well-received debut book but whose career is now floundering.
While teaching at a writing seminar at Ripley College, Jacob meets Evan Parker, a cocky aspiring writer.
Evan tells Jacob he’s writing a book that will be a guaranteed success. Intrigued and jealous,Jacob gets Even to explain his plot idea.
A year or two later, Jacob’s writing career is still stagnant. He decides to look up Evan and discovers Evan has died.
Jacob decides he will write a book based on Evan’s idea. There are no original ideas and a plot that interesting deserves to be told, right?
Three years later, Jacob’s book, The Crib, is on the bestseller list and has been optioned for a movie. He’s having a long distance friendship with Anna, a TV producer he met on a book promotion interview in Seattle.
Jacob starts receiving anonymous messages through his website from someone called Talented Tom who says they know what Jacob stole and who he stole it from.
Alarmed, Jacob decides to try to figure out Tom’s identity. He finds a message on Evan’s online memorial page from Martin, a fellow student in the MFA class. He Google stalks Martin and also finds a Ripley alumni page on which Evan had posted.
Jake’s publisher is pressing him to finish his new book. Meanwhile “Talented Tom” starts tweeting things about Jacob not being the author of Crib. Anna moves to NYC and Jake’s relationship with her gets more serious.
Talented Tom’s posts are getting some traction and his publisher calls him in to talk. They decide to sue Talented Tom as a way to uncover his identity. But the publisher’s legal threats have the opposite effect: Tom gets even more attention.
Anna and Jake are married and soon after, Tom sends a threatening letter to Jacob’s home.
Jake meets with Martin, who doesn’t think Evan showed his work to anyone, and visits the Parker family tavern.
The bartender says that Evan Parker was not a nice person. He also mentions that Evan’s parents died from carbon monoxide poisoning and that his sister Dianna died in a fire. The only living family member is Dianna‘s child, Rose, who left town.
We now realize that Jacob’s story, about a woman who kills her teenage daughter and assumes her identity, is based on Evan’s family.
Jake stole Evan’s story, but the story he stole is the real-life story of Evan’s sister Dianna, her teen pregnancy, and her murder of (and then impersonation of) her daughter Rose.
Tom starts researching Evan’s family and finds out that “Rose” (actually Dianna) sold the family house and then vanished.
The lawyer who handled the house sale remembers was that “Rose” attended college in Georgia.
Anna calls, extremely upset as she found out about the plagiarism scandal. She can’t believe Jacob didn’t tell her.
Jacob travels to Georgia and finds out that Rose attended the University of Georgia but didn’t graduate. He visits the lawyer who represented Rose in the real estate transaction and threatens him by suggesting that Rose was involved in Evan’s death.
Jacob stays in town to do more research. He goes to the apartment complex where Rose lived and finds an employee who remembered her. He shows her Rose’s high school yearbook picture and she says that isn’t Rose. This confirms that Jacob is right: “Rose” is her mother Dianna.
He finds a newspaper account of Dianna’s death, which says that she was camping with her sister Rose (age 26) and died in a fire caused by a propane heater. He goes to the campground where Diandra allegedly died. Two local men Jacob talks to realize he is referencing the plot of his own book and think he’s a crackpot.
Jacob now sees a way out of his plagiarism scandal: he will re-write the story as true crime.
Spoiler: who is Talented Tom in The Plot?
Jake arrives home and Anna has made soup for him, an old family recipe.
She’s leaving soon on a red-eye flight to Seattle, but sits with him while he eats.
Then Jacob tells her he stole Evan’s story but might have gotten some the details wrong in his novel.
Anna laughs at him. She says that she wasn’t going to kill Jake until he started playing detective. She drugged his soup and now she gives him a bunch more pills and, as she waits for him die, confesses everything.
Yes, Anna is Dianna.
She was always jealous of her brother Evan, the golden child. She was responsible for her parents’ death.
The carbon monoxide monitor kept going off and Anna/Dianna replaced the batteries with dead ones. She killed her daughter Rose in the fire (but told authorities Rose was her sister).
Dianna gave up everything, sacrificed everything for Rose, who was never affectionate and always ungrateful.
She killed her brother Evan too, when he started making noises about selling the house.
Also, she heard Evan was going go to try to be a writer. Then she discovered that Evan had written 200 pages of her story. Evan was a heavy drug user, so Dianna faked an overdose and killed him.
Dianna left Georgia and went to Washington State where she heard about Jacob’s book. She couldn’t figure out how someone had found out her story. After she read Jacob’s book, she was furious. It wasn’t his story to tell. So she engineered a meeting with him.
Anna/Dianna shows Jacob a suicide note she wrote for him, one that references the terrible plagiarism scandal . She leaves and Jacob dies. As his wife, she takes over his literary estate and tells and interviewer she’s thinking of becoming a writer herself.
Plot Summary for The Plot: Jacob’s Version in the Crib
Remember, this isn’t what really happened. It’s just Jacob’s fictionalized version of the plot Evan told him. It’s interspersed with Jacob’s narrative as a way to slowly reveal Evan’s plot.
Samantha, a teenager, gets pregnant by her mom’s boss. She eventually drops out of high school and has her baby, a girl named Maria.
Both of Samantha’s parents die.
Maria is a very independent child. When she’s a sophomore in high school, Samantha gets a call from the guidance counselor, who says that Maria is going to graduate early and go to college.
Samantha finds a college acceptance in her daughter’s room. After all the sacrifices Samantha made, Maria is planning to leave her.
The two argue. Samantha grabs Maria and in the struggle, Maria’s head hits the bedpost and she dies. Samantha packs up all their stuff, buries her daughter’s body in the woods, and leaves town.
In Jacob’s book, Samantha also kills Maria’s girlfriend Gab who won’t stop looking for her. She poisons Gab, who is allergic to nuts, with peanut butter hidden in a pizza. Interesting – was Jacob predicting his own death? That was some foreshadowing I definitely picked up on.
Spoiler Discussion for The Plot
Did you find the pace of The Plot too slow?
A lot of readers have remarked that they found the pace draggy and were even bored.
This story does take some time to set up and is more of the Big Twist plot model in which the whole story is set-up for that Big Twist.
I didn’t like Jake much, but I was invested in his story from the outset and wanted to see what would happen next.
Did you guess who Talented Tom was?
I mean, there wasn’t anyone else it could be! I briefly considered Martin but … nah. Jacob’s agent? Nah. I think this book could have used a few more suspects.
I still thought this was a good twist and I really liked the set-up of this. Jacob thinks he stole a fictional plot, but actually stole a real one.
Did you catch all the literary references?
James, in comments, does a good job of summing up the Marilynne Robinson Homecoming references (and even found a new one). I haven’t read The Talented Mr. Ripley but I bet there are some more Easter eggs in there that I haven’t noticed.
Did you see the ending coming?
I briefly thought that Anna might be like hey, let’s live happily ever after off the money from The Crib. But Jake had already gone around poking his nose in and blabbing to everyone so I suspected he was going to be Dianna’s next victim.
I mean, Anna/Dianna had to kill him to protect herself and keep the secret of all the murders she committed.
Plus, in Jake’s own book, The Crib, he has Gab, a nosy character who just can’t stop poking around looking for her missing girlfriend Maria. Gab is killed by Maria’s mom, also with food.
Movie News: The Plot is coming to Hulu!
The Plot will be adapted into a streaming series on Hulu. No release date has been announced.
Here’s what we know:
Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book) will produce and star.
Abby Ajayi (Inventing Anna) will adapt the book into a script and act as show runner.
By making Jake a Black man, the series will be able to explore issues of authorship and appropriation with even more nuance.
So far, there have been no other casting decisions announced, but stay tuned!
Thanks for reading this Spoiler Discussion for the Plot
What other books would you recommend to fans of The Plot?
If you like the “meta” aspect of the story, check out my List of Story Within a Story thrillers.
Here’s my list of books that remind me a bit of The Plot:
Yellowface by R. F. Huang
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
The Likeness by Tana French
Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
Join my other Spoiler Discussion Posts!
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What I found especially enjoyable about this novel is that the two key riddles (the identity of Talented Tom and the fact that Anna is actually Evan’s sister) are solvable by literary references (perhaps appropriate for a book about books). It’s clear from the outset that Talented Tom must be a member of the Parker family, and initially, based on the information in Evan’s obituary, Rose is the obvious candidate since she’s supposedly the sole surviving member of the family. Jake doesn’t take the Highsmith reference far enough, however, since he thinks it’s simply meant to call out his association with Ripley College. But what does Tom Ripley do in the Talented Mr. Ripley? He assumes the identity of his victim, just as Dianna did with Rose.
As for Anna, even the brief account she gives of her past to Jake during their first conversation is enough to make the reader realize that she’s ‘stealing’ the plot of Marilynne Robinson’s Homecoming and passing it off as her own backstory, with a few modifications. This is further highlighted when Anna cites Marilynne Robinson as one of her favorite writers in response to Jake’s question about what she likes to read, also during that first conversation. She later makes the deception even more explicit, by claiming that she grew up in Rawbone, Iowa—a town that exists only in the pages
of Robinson’s novel (she mocks Jake at the end for not having picked up on this). There are no innocent literary borrowings in this novel, so those references are bright red flags that Anna is not who she seems.
One other interesting point: Marilynne Robinson grew up in a small
town in Bonner County, Iowa, and I can only assume that the name ‘Jake Bonner’ is intended to further reinforce the importance of the Robinson references to the plot of The Plot!
I suspected Anna as well. I read Homecoming years and years ago so I didn’t recognize her life story as a literary reference, but Anna wass the only one who could be Talented Tom. And, like you, I was familiar with the plot of The Talented Mr. Ripley so I figured out that Anna = Dianna pretending to be Rose.
I also loved the story within a story and the multiple levels of stealing. Evan steals Rose and Dianna’s story, then Jake steals Evan’s story. Dianna steals Rose’s identity and then morphs into Anna. Also, we have multiple version of the same story: Evan’s partial manuscript of the Rose story, Crib is Jake’s interpretation of the story Evan told him, and then there’s the “truth” pieced together by Jake later on. At times I had to remind myself that Rose didn’t die when her mom pushed her into the bedpost; that was only Jake’s made-up version.
Good catch on Bonner – I bet there are a lot more Easter eggs in there that we haven’t noticed. Anyone see others?
There’s only one point in the book where she specifies the name of the town she supposedly grew up in, and that’s at the very end. (It’s Fingerbone, Idaho not Rawbone, Iowa.) At that point, she’s not claiming to have lived there but is taunting Jake for missing the references to a book that an MFA writing teacher should have been familiar with. (If there was another reference in the book that I missed, please accept my apologies.)
Another example of a non-innocent literary reference comes at the end when Jake starts to envision that a non-fiction true crimes work about Dianna Parker’s crimes could become an even bigger hit than Crib. “LOOK ON MY WORKS YOU MIGHTY AND DESPAIR! Nothing besides remains.” Korelitz’s quoting of Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias is a rebuke to Jake’s fantasies and a strong hint that things are not going to end well for him.
While some people might be surprised to find out Anna is Dianna/TalentedTom, I strongly suspect most readers will have figured it out. (Leaving out the Housekeeping clue, the biggest giveaway is that when he goes to Athens, GA to meet Arthur Pickens, “Rosa Parker”‘s lawyer, he finds out that the lawyer already knows who he is and is stonewalling. Obviously, TalentedTom has warned him in advance, but how could he know he was coming? The only person Jake told in advance was his wife, Anna.) But what I like to propose is this—Korelitz wants the reader to figure this out before Jake does because he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. Although he’s a likable and sympathetic character, Jake never can completely admit—even to himself—that what he did was wrong, and so he has to pay at the end.
There’s an Æsop fable that reminds me of Jake’s predicament in this book. A monkey finds a vase with a narrow neck filled with delicious nuts. The monkey reaches inside and grabs as many nuts as he can fit into his fist, but then finds he can’t get it out of the vase. He sees men coming with nets but he doesn’t want to give up the nuts, so he winds up getting captured. All Jake has to do is come clean even if it means seeing his new literary reputation take a nosedive, but it’s something he can’t give so he gets killed by Anna. But on the bright side, in death he becomes a literary martyr like F.Scott Fitzgerald or David Foster Wallace, and people will now read the books that publishers didn’t initially touch. But was it really worth the price?
I agree with you that the author wasn’t trying to hide it. I missed the Housekeeping clue but there are many others to find. There was also only one female character who could have been Dianna/Rose, and that was Anna. Also, just referencing The Talented Mr. Ripley suggests a stolen identity plot. I prefer books where clues are dropped along the way rather than those that keep everything murky and then try to explain everything in the last few chapters.
Also agree that what Jake did was morally gray but he could have come clean. If he had told Anna what was going on and tried to come clean that would have complicated things even more, as Anna didn’t want anyone to know what she did. It was only when he started poking into the story that she had to kill him. Or maybe she would have killed him anyway…
I’m pretty sure she would have killed him anyway. The first thing she says when she’s helping him to bed is “I wasn’t going to do this yet.” [emphasis mine] She was always planning to kill him—preferably as a widow so she could take full control of his literary estate, but if he didn’t fall head over heels for her? She would have stalked him until she could find a way to give him an unfortunate accident.
The irony is that assuming what (Di)anna told him at the end was true, his fears of TalentedTom destroying his literary career through his threats was groundless because Dianna had already destroyed all the evidence that could have proven that the plot for Jake’s Crib came directly from Evan Parker’s unpublished manuscript.
The Anna/ Dianne character is evil. What Jake did is nothing, to what Dianne/ Anna did. Like you said, Jake would have been killed by her anyway. Otherwise why did she go to such lengths to meet him and then marry him. She impresses Jake,his parents, his friends. The author describes her nature as a warm person! Cannot figure out such behavior. How us this possible ? What did Dianne want ?
Did not like the book as Dianne turns to be the winner
Hi Bhavani- so glad you joined our discussion!
Yes, Anna is evil but I think she would say that Jake stole her story and profited from it, and that was both unfair and unethical. (Okay, because she is a murderer, she can’t really take the moral high ground here lol). But I think she would say she is taking back what is rightfully hers. But it’s also unethical (and I think illegal) to profit from a crime, so someone needs to go after her and get that money. I don’t think there will be a part two, but that would be it.
I felt the intricate plot nicely set up the story. Not too slow for me. Loved the author references (I had to look up some of them) and names of crime conferences. I learned new names and events.
I didn’t find it slow either! It was a complicated plot so I liked that it unfolded at a more measured pace.
I was impressed by the analyses of Plot that the commentators provided. The point that the author might have deliberately made the identity of Jake’s tormentor implicit to demonstrate that he wasn’t quite as clever as he thought he was struck me as good.
The book possesses literary elements in its allusiveness to Highsmith and others. But the psychopathology of the tormentor and her successful history of crime seemed ridiculous to me, given her unflagging kindness and normalcy in her relationship with Jake. Not only would she be unable to get away with her misdeeds, but daily life with even the stupidest person would reveal elements of her true nature. And though the ending was inevitable, given the buildup, it struck me as ridiculous, too.
But Plot is basically genre fiction (thriller, horror), and there is no point in expecting more from it than the genre allows. I can understand why people like the book.
You don’t think Anna could have hidden her true nature as a way to fool Jake, marry him, kill him and get his money? She successfully impersonated her daughter. Like The Talented Mr. Ripley, she’s a sociopathic/psychopathic chameleon. I figured out she was either Rose or Dianna pretty quickly but only because there were no other female characters, not because I thought there was something “off” about her. If anything I thought she seemed too good to be true.
But the psychopathology of the tormentor and her successful history of crime seemed ridiculous to me, given her unflagging kindness and normalcy in her relationship with Jake. Not only would she be unable to get away with her misdeeds, but daily life with even the stupidest person would reveal elements of her true nature.
Exactly, how is the dichotomy possible. If the character is so evil, that kind of kindness,sweetness is impossible.
I did not find the plot too slow, but I realized who Anna was far earlier than I would have enjoyed. I thought the writing was good and the story was enjoyable though.
Same! I mean, there were not many options as to who she could be. I did really enjoy this one. I tried the book by the same author that the Undoing was based on, but didn’t love that. Maybe I’ll go back and read some Patricia Highsmith!
I also wondered whether I’m right in assuming the title is actually about the grave plot.
I think “plot” could definitely have a double meaning!
Yes! If you look closely at the book cover, you can see that you’re in a grave, looking up and out at the dirt, grass, and sky!
Ooh good catch I didn’t notice that!
As for me, I thought that when Jake received that letter from Talented Tom- why didn’t he look at the postmark?
Also, when he received the first email, I knew it had to be from Anna because he had just been with her.
Loved the last few pages!
Good point! And yes, I was side-eyeing Anna for a while. I thought the ending was pretty dark, but it fit.
For me personally the novel turned out to be a shallowy bummer. I figured out the blackmailer way too early, and I was badly missing all the details that usually make characters real, flesh-and-blood persons.
As for Ester Eggs, I think that by and large Anna’s story relates to the line of that nasty character from East of Eden (Cathy?).
I agree that there was not much suspense as to the identity of the blackmailer. I don’t think I’ve read E of E but I’m going to check that out!
I figured out that Anna was @TalentedTom immediately after they met. Like when he got the first text the day they met. Their romance in the book seemed “too good to be true” and like something out of a Hallmark movie.
I didn’t figure out the mother killing the daughter and how Anna was related to that until later.
I was wary of Anna and the way the spinach soup was discussed in so much detail both times, I thought she was going to poison him.
I didn’t like Jake or Anna. On the other hand, I don’t think taking the story idea from someone who was deceased was so bad but he should have told people the idea was described to him verbally by another.
Completely agree! She was definitely too good to be true. I also figured out the soup!
Yes. I totally agree. When there is way too much foreshadowing you know the author is making a point. Too obvious.