Imagine being a writing professor at a small community college. Your own novel had meager success but it certainly feels like your chance of fame and fortune are rapidly dwindling. Enter a young man named Evan. He doesn’t want or need your help with his writing. He has the best plot, one completely new, one that doesn’t follow a single trope. You read a few pages and he’s right, it is totally different than anything you’ve ever read, depressingly you wished you had though of the plot first. This is the story of Jake Finch Bonner, a writer who has the skill, but maybe not the story to tell…
The small college where Jake teaches at releases the writing department and offers to hire them back as an online entity only at a much lower wage. Jake sees this as a time to leave academia and work as the “artist in residence” at a writing retreat. It’s there that he decides to look up his former student and see if he ever published his book. As it turns out Evan Parker died of a drug overdose a few months after their meeting where Jake got to read a few of his pages. It would be a tragedy if that story wasn’t told…and who better to tell it, but Jake? And it’s not plagiarism because he only had Evan’s amorphous ideas, right?
Fast forward and Jake “Finch” Bonner (middle name fake because he loved To Kill a Mocking Bird, just sooo much) has the number one best selling novel in the world. It’s called Crib (not like to “crib”and steal, but like a baby’s crib). and that novel has given him a life he could only dream about. He’s met Oprah, Spielberg is directing a film adaptation of the novel, he’s living in NYC with one of the best literary agents. Life is excellent. Until it isn’t. He receives anonymous emails from someone who knows that his story isn’t his story…but Jake feels like it is. He’s furious that someone is trying to control his life and so like any good writer, he decides to go digging into the past to find out who is attempting to blackmail him.
I really enjoyed this book. I saw the twist coming from a mile away but I almost think that was expected because it really isn’t hiding at all, which leads me to believe that we are supposed to criticize Jake. He thinks he’s really smart, but is he? The book flies by and is an enjoyable dark little read. I haven’t read anything by Korelitz before but I will certainly be looking for her books in the future.