The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Only it hadn’t. And while he’d continued to have the occasional crusty and serviceable idea in the years since—boy grows up in family obsessed with dog breeding, man discovers older sibling has been institutionalized since birth—there’d been nothing tap, tapping away at him, compelling him to write. The work he’d done since then, on these and a couple of even worse ideas, had petered, excruciatingly, out.

  Until, if he was being completely honest with himself, and just now he was being completely honest with himself, he’d stopped even trying. It had been more than two years since he had written a word of fiction.

  Once, long ago, Jake had done his best to honor what he’d been given. He had recognized his spark and done right by it, never shirking the hard thinking and the careful writing, pushing himself to do well and then to do better. He had taken no short cuts and evaded no effort. He had taken his chance against the world, submitting himself to the opinions of publishers, reviewers and ordinary readers … but favor had passed over him and moved on to others, What was he to do, who was he to be, if no other spark ever came to him again?

  It was unbearable to contemplate.

  Good writers borrow, great writers steal, Jake was thinking. That ubiquitous phrase was attributed to T. S. Eliot (which didn’t mean Eliot hadn’t, himself, stolen it!), but Eliot had been talking, perhaps less than seriously, about the theft of actual language—phrases and sentences and paragraphs—not of a story, itself. Besides, Jake knew, as Eliot had known, as all artists ought to know, that every story, like single work of art—from the cave paintings to whatever was playing at the Park Theater in Cobleskill to his own puny books—was in conversation with every other work of art: bouncing against its predecessors, drawing from its contemporaries, harmonizing with the patterns. All of it, paintings and choreography and poetry and photography and performance art and the ever-fluctuating novel, was whirling away in an unstoppable spin art machine of its own. And that was a beautiful, thrilling thing.

  He would hardly be the first to take some tale from a play or a book—in this case, a book that had never been written!—and create something entirely new from it. Miss Saigon from Madam Butterfly. The Hours from Mrs. Dalloway. The Lion King from Hamlet, for goodness’ sake! It wasn’t even taboo, and obviously it wasn’t theft; even if Parker’s manuscript actually existed at the time of his death, Jake had never seen more than a couple of pages of the thing, and he remembered little of what he had seen: the mother on the psychic hotline, the daughter writing about carpetbaggers, the ring of pineapples around the door of the old house. Surely what he, himself, might make from so little would belong to him and only to him.

  These, then, were the circumstances in which Jake found himself that January evening at his computer in his cruddy Cobleskill apartment in the Leatherstocking Region of upstate New York, out of pride, hope, time and—he could finally admit—ideas of his own.

  He hadn’t gone looking for this. He had upheld the honor of writers who listened to the ideas of other writers and then turned responsibly back to their own. He had absolutely not invited the brilliant spark his student had abandoned (okay, involuntarily abandoned) to come to him, but come it had and here it was: this urgent, shimmering thing, already tap, tapping in his head, already hounding him: the idea, the characters, the problem.

  So what was Jake going to do about that?

  A rhetorical question, obviously. He knew exactly what he was going to do about that.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Crib Syndrome

  Three years later, Jacob Finch Bonner, author of The Invention of Wonder and of the decidedly less obscure novel Crib (over two million copies in print and the current occupant of the number two spot on the New York Times hardcover list—after a solid nine months at number one), found himself on the stage of the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium of the Seattle Symphony. The woman seated opposite him was a type he’d come to know well during his interminable book tour: a breathless, hand-flapping enthusiast who might never have read a novel before, she was so enraptured at encountering this particular one. She made Jake’s own job easier by virtue of the fact that she gushed incessantly and seldom formed a cogent question. Mainly all he was called upon to do was nod, thank her, and look out over the audience with a grateful, self-effacing smile.

  This wasn’t his first trip to Seattle to promote the book, but the earlier visit had taken place during the first weeks of the tour as the country was just becoming aware of Crib, and the venues had been the usual ones for a not-yet-famous author: The Elliot Bay Book Company, a Barnes & Noble branch in Bellevue. To Jake, those were exciting enough. (There had been no book tour at all for The Invention of Wonder, and the personal request he’d made to read at the Barnes & Noble near his hometown on Long Island had yielded an audience of six, including his parents, his old English teacher, and the mother of his high school girlfriend, who must have spent the reading wondering what her daughter had ever seen in Jake.) What had been even more exciting about those first-round Seattle readings, and the hundreds like them all over the country, was that people actually came to them, people who were not his parents or high school teachers or otherwise somehow obligated to attend. The forty who’d shown up for that Elliott Bay reading, for example, or the twenty-five at the Bellevue Barnes & Noble, were complete strangers, and that was just astonishing. So astonishing, in fact, that it had taken a couple of months for the thrill to wear off.

  It had worn off now.

  That tour—technically the hardcover tour—had never really ended. As the book took off, more and more dates were added, increasingly for series where purchase of the book was part of the price of admission, and then the festivals started getting appended to the schedule: Miami, Texas, AWP, Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime (these last two, like so much else about the thriller genre he’d inadvertently entered, had heretofore been unfamiliar to him). In all, he’d barely stopped traveling since the book was first published, accompanied by a worshipful off-the-book-page profile in The New York Times, the kind that had once made him weak-kneed with envy. Then, after a few months of that, the novel’s paperback had been rushed into print when Oprah named it her October selection, and now Jake was returning to some of his earlier stops, but in venues even he had never conceived of.

  The S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, for example, had over 2,400 seats—Jake had looked that up in advance. Two thousand four hundred seats! And as far as he could tell from where he was sitting, every single one of them was occupied. Out there he could make out the bright kelly green of the new paperback’s cover on people’s laps and in their arms. Most of these people had brought their own copies, which he supposed did not bode well for the four thousand copies Elliot Bay was now unpacking at the signing tables out in the lobby, but man it was gratifying to him. When The Invention of Wonder was published nearly fifteen years earlier, he had settled on the I’ll-know-I’ve-made-it fantasy of seeing a stranger reading his book in public, and needless to say, this had never happened. Once, on the subway, he had seen a guy reading a book that looked tantalizingly like his, but when he edged closer, took a seat opposite, and checked it out, he’d discovered it was actually the new Scott Turow, and that had been only the first of several such crushing false alarms. Neither, obviously, had it happened with Reverberations, of which fewer than eight hundred copies had even been sold (and he’d purchased two hundred of them himself as cheap remaindered copies). Now this auditorium was full of living, breathing readers who had paid actual money for their tickets and were here in the enormous space, clutching his book as they leaned forward in their seats and laughing uproariously at everything he said, even the banal stuff about what his “process” was and how he still carried his laptop around in the same leather satchel he’d owned for years.

  “Oh my god,” said the woman in the other chair, “I have to tell you, I was on a plane and I was reading the book, and I came to the part—I think you all probably know the part I�
�m speaking of—and I just, like, gasped! Like, I made a noise! And the flight attendant came over and she said, ‘Are you okay?’ and I said, ‘Oh my god, this book!’ And she asked me what book I was reading, so I showed her, and she started to laugh. She said this has been happening for months, people yelping and gasping in the middle of a flight. It’s like a syndrome. Like: Crib syndrome!”

  “Oh, that’s so funny,” said Jake. “I always used to look at what people were reading on planes. It never used to be by me, I can tell you that!”

  “But your first novel was a New & Noteworthy in The New York Times.”

  “Yes, it was. That was a very great honor. Unfortunately it didn’t translate to people actually going into bookstores and buying it. In fact, I don’t think the book was even in bookstores. I remember my mother telling me they didn’t have it at her local chain store on Long Island. She had to special order it. That’s pretty rough on a Jewish mother whose kid isn’t even a doctor.”

  Explosive laughter. The interviewer—her name was Candy and she was some sort of local public figure—doubled over. When she got control of herself, she asked Jake the thoroughly predictable one about how he’d first gotten the idea.

  “I don’t think ideas, even great ideas, are all that hard to come by. When people ask me where I get my ideas, my answer is that there are a hundred novels in every day’s issue of The New York Times, and we recycle the paper or use it to line the birdcage. If you are trapped in your own experience you may find it hard to see beyond things that have actually happened to you, and unless you’ve had a life of National Geographic–worthy adventures you’re probably going to think you have nothing to write a novel about. But if you spend even a few minutes with other people’s stories and learn to ask yourself: What if this had happened to me? Or What if this happened to a person completely unlike me? Or In a world that’s different from the world I’m living in? Or What if it happened a little bit differently, under different circumstances? The possibilities are endless. The directions you can go, the characters you can meet along the way, the things you can learn, also endless. I’ve taught in MFA programs, and I can tell you, that’s maybe the most important thing anyone can teach you. Get out of your own head and look around. There are stories growing from trees.”

  “Well, okay,” said Candy, “but which tree did you pick this one off of? ’Cause I’m telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.” She smirked at the audience, and the audience obligingly laughed. “And I can’t think of another novel that would have had me making an actual noise on a plane. So how’d you come up with it?”

  And here it was: that cold wave of terror descending inside Jake, from the crown of his head, past his grinning mouth and along each limb, down to the end of every finger or toe. Incredibly, he wasn’t yet used to this, although it had been with him, every moment of every day, back through this tour and the tour preceding it, back through the heady months before publication, as his new publisher ramped up the temperature and the book world began to take notice. Back through the writing of the thing itself, which had taken six months of winter and spring in his apartment in Cobleskill, New York, and in his office behind the old front desk at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, hoping none of the guest-writers upstairs would bother him with complaints about the rooms or questions about how to get an agent at William Morris Endeavor, all the way back to that January night when he’d read the obituary of his most memorable student, Evan Parker. He had carried this around with him, every moment of every day, a perpetual threat of permanent harm.

  Jake, needless to say, had taken not one single word from those pages he’d read back at Ripley. He hadn’t had them to steal from, for one thing, and if he had he would have thrown them away in order not to look. Even the late Evan Parker, were he capable of reading Crib, would have found it impossible to locate his own language in Jake’s novel, and yet, ever since the moment he’d typed the words “CHAPTER ONE” into his laptop back in Cobleskill he’d been waiting, horribly waiting, for someone who knew the answer to this very question—How’d you come up with it?—to rise to their feet and point their finger in accusation.

  Candy wasn’t that person, obviously. Candy didn’t know much about much, and nothing, it was abundantly clear, even to him, about this particular thing. What Candy brought to their conversation was an admirable sense of ease while being stared at by upward of twenty-four hundred human beings, and this was not a quality Jake himself devalued, by any means. Behind her question, though, was clear vapidity. It was just a question. Sometimes a question was just a question.

  “Oh, you know,” he finally said, “it’s not actually that interesting a story. It’s actually a little bit embarrassing. I mean, think of the most banal activity you can imagine—I was taking my garbage out to the curb, and this mom from my block happened to drive by with her teenage daughter. The two of them were screaming at each other in their car. Obviously, you know, having a moment, like no other mother and teenage daughter has ever had.”

  Here Jake knew to pause for laughter. He had contrived the taking-the-garbage-out story for precisely these occasions, and he’d told it many times by now. People always laughed.

  “And the idea of it just popped into my head. I mean, let’s be honest. Can she who has never thought I could kill my mother or This kid is going to drive me to murder please raise her hand?”

  The huge audience was still. Candy was still. Then there was another wave of laughter, this one far less exuberant. It was always like that.

  “And I just started thinking, you know, how bad could that argument be? How bad could it get? Could it ever get, you know, that bad? And then what would happen if it did?”

  After a moment Candy said: “Well, I guess we all know the answer to that, now.”

  More laughter then, and then applause. So much applause. He and Candy shook hands and got to their feet, and waved, and exited the stage, and parted, she to the greenroom and he to the signing table in the lobby, where the long and coiling line he had once fantasized about had already begun to form. Six young women were arrayed along the table to his left. One sold the copies of Crib, another wrote the name of any dedicatee on a Post-it and affixed that to the cover, and a third opened the books to the right page. All he had to do was smile and write his name, which he did, over and over, until his jaw ached and his left hand ached and every face began to look like the face before it, or the face after it, or both faces at once.

  Hi, thanks for coming!

  Oh, that’s so nice!

  Really? That’s amazing!

  Good luck with your writing!

  It was his fifteenth evening event in as many days, except for the previous Monday night, which he’d spent in a hotel in Milwaukee, eating a terrible burger and answering emails before passing out during Rachel Maddow. He had not been home to his apartment—a new apartment, bought with the astonishing advance he’d received for Crib, and still barely furnished—since late August and it was now the end of September. He was living on hotel burgers, late-night whiskey sours, minibar jelly beans, and sheer strain, trying constantly to conjure up new or at least variant answers to the same questions he’d now been asked hundreds of times, and down—despite all those jelly beans—at least five pounds on a frame that couldn’t afford to lose much more. His agent Matilda (who was not the agent who’d bungled Jake’s first novel and resolutely detached herself from his second!) called every few days to casually ask how far into the next novel he was (answer: not far enough), and a chorus of writers he’d known in graduate school and college and during those New York years were following him like Furies, bombarding him with requests—everything from blurbs for their manuscripts to recommendations for artists’ colonies to requests to be put in touch with Matilda. In short, he could look no farther ahead than a day or two. Farther than that he left to Otis, the liaison Macmillan had sent out on the road with him. It was a strange, almost disembodied w
ay to live.

  But also: his exact dream. Back when he’d dreamed, so long ago (not even a year ago!) of being a “successful writer,” had he not pictured these very things? Audiences, stacks of books, that magical “1” beside his name on the fabled list at the back of The New York Times Book Review? He had, of course, but also hoped for the small, human connections that must come to a writer whose work was actually read: opening one’s own book, writing one’s own name, holding it out to a single reader intent on reading it. Was it wrong to want these simple, humble rewards? Hand to hand and brain to brain in the marvelous connection that was written language meeting the power of storytelling? He had these things now. And to think: he had acquired them with only his hard work and his pure imagination.

  Plus a story that might not have been entirely his to tell.

  Which somebody, somewhere out there, might conceivably know.

  All of it, at any time, might be ripped away from him—rip, rip, rip—and so quickly that Jake would find himself helpless and annihilated even before he knew what was happening. Then he would be relegated to the circle of shamed writers forever and without hope of appeal: James Frey, Stephen Glass, Clifford Irving, Greg Mortenson, Jerzy Kosinski …

  Jacob Finch Bonner?

  “Thank you,” Jake heard himself say as a young man mentioned some nice thing about The Invention of Wonder. “That’s one of my favorites, too.”

  The words struck him as somehow familiar, and then he remembered that this exact phrase had been another fancy of his, and for the briefest moment this made him feel so utterly happy. But only the briefest moment. After that, he went back to being terrified again.