IF YOU read books and pay any attention to the publishing hype machine, you might be aware of The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Korelitz is the author of You Should Have Known, which was adapted into the shallowly disappointing HBO miniseries The Undoing, so she’s got some above-the-line fame helping her out1. And The Plot has gotten a lot of hyperventilating praise implying that it’s one of those truly surprising books that comes along once in a while, like a more literary Gone Girl2. The New York Times said it “keeps you guessing and wondering,” and Kirkus Reviews warned that “only the shrewdest will anticipate the jaw-dropping final revelation.”
I am here to tell you folks: Neither of these statements are true3.
If you aren’t familiar with the plot of ‘The Plot,’ here it is in capsule form: A once-promising novelist finds himself sinking down the ladder of literary obscurity4. Teaching a “low residency” writing program at a small Vermont college, he encounters a student who has a truly brilliant plot for a story. Years later, having sunk even further down the pecking order5, our writer learns the student died shortly after taking his class—without ever publishing or even sharing his brilliant idea. So the writer takes the idea and writes a novel, and the idea really is so incredible the book becomes not just a bestseller but a phenomenon. He’s instantly a literary superstar. A few years later, just as he meets the woman who will soon be his wife, he begins to get anonymous notes from someone who knows he stole the idea—and from who.
Now, this is a nifty idea for a thriller! I am not here to shit on this idea. It’s solid. The book itself is also solid. It’s entertaining and moves along at that brisk pace you want out of a summer read. It will also probably make for a perfectly fine disappointing HBO miniseries someday. But the book suffers from two problems that I think will be useful to explore, two problems that anyone trying to construct a story will wrestle with: The World-Beating Idea and The Final Twist.
Beating the World
First, let’s talk about the ‘plot’ in the plot of The Plot. Any time you put a World-Beating Idea into a story, you’re setting yourself up to have two shitty choices. The moment you tell your audience that someone has created something truly great in your fictional world—written a novel that goes globally viral, say—you must either show the audience this great, terrific thing or figure out how not to show them6. Both have huge risks, of course. The first approach risks everyone shrugging and thinking to themselves eh, that’s not really brilliant, and that sound you hear is everyone’s suspension of disbelief crashing to the floor and shattering. The second risks feeling like a cheat, and making your story feel artificial and made-up. If you tell people they’re going to the Fireworks Factory, after all, eventually they want to see that place burn7.
Consider every time a TV series or film wants you to believe a character is a uber-successful pop star, and then they play a clip of their music. It’s always a confusing disappointment, because it’s very difficult to just make something World-Beating8.
And that’s Korelitz’s problem in The Plot, and I empathize with her. She chooses to include samples of the supposedly World-Beating novel in her novel, titled Crib. Crib is a worldwide megaseller. Oprah picks it for the book club, Steven Spielberg is adapting it, and its author gets the sort of star treatment most writers can only dream of. And the thing is, the plot of Crib—the twist that supposedly so incredible anyone could have a worldwide bestseller with it—is simply not that great.
It’s a fine twist. It’s a solid plot. Crib would make for a very good story, I think, if properly developed. But it’s not a World-Beater. Because if Korelitz had a World-Beating idea, she would write that book, I think. As would you. If the idea is truly that great, you run with it. Hence, all fictional brilliancies are doomed to disappoint, but if you avoid showing them your reader has contempt for the strategy. You’re fucked9.
TWIST INCOMING
If you read The Plot and you are surprised at the final twist that comes at the end of the story, I question your intelligence and/or reading comprehension skills. Because the twist is incredibly obvious to anyone familiar with the Law of Conservation of Characters or who has ever read a twisty thriller ever in their life, ever. I mean, the hype machine worked on me10: I bought and read The Plot because I was promised something unique and surprising. All I got was a perfectly fine thriller.
In fact, if you re-read my plot description in the third paragraph of this ranty newsletter, I’ll bet you can pinpoint the detail that stands out as VERY IMPORTANT and very, very obviously part of the twist.
And this is a problem for writers whenever they have a nifty twist to deliver, because you have to balance surprise with fair play. Readers don’t tolerate twists that come out of thin air. Suddenly announcing that your main character was Jesus all along isn’t mind-blowing unless there were multiple clues—meaty, substantial clues that seem obvious in retrospect. You have to play fair and give your readers at least the sense that they could have guessed your twist. And that required fair play means it is very, very easy to leave one too many clues and spoil your twist. In fact, if you’re doing it right spoiling the twist should absolutely be a risk.
I guessed the twist in The Plot about halfway through, I think. I was, again, aided by the Law of Conservation of Characters, which states that every character in a story has to have some kind of role or purpose, with the corollary that if you’ve got a secret villain or other obfuscated character, they have to come from the characters we’ve met in the story. In other words, introducing a wholly new character as your villain in Chapter 57 isn’t a brilliant trick, it’s shitty writing. Which means when you’re hunting a twist in a book like Korelitz’s, you start with the people you’ve met who have had a curious amount of development but haven’t had much to do yet. It is almost always that character.
As it was here. There’s no real winning here—Korelitz handles the balancing of her twist about as well as an author can. She wrote this book with skill, and it’s entertaining and well-crafted. But it also illustrates two challenges any writer will face when writing a story, and how they can be fails even if the novel itself is, overall, a success11.
Carrying on the theme of my general incompetence, now is the time when I wonder if anyone on my mailing list has actually read or heard of The Plot. No? Aces.
Next week: The Tomorrow War’s epic dumbness.
The Undoing was a master class in acting like you were just about to drop the world’s greatest twist and then basically shrugging and walking out of the room.
I will confess right now I am so jealous of authors who get this sort of publicity I may not be entirely objective about their novels.
Me being me, I must at least hold out for the possibility that I am simply smarter than most people. YOU HEARD ME.
Holy shit my ears just burst into flame.
The publishing/writing inside baseball of this novel is head-spinning if you’ve ever had drinks with your editor and agent to discuss film options and then five years later found yourself self-publishing a novel. He said speculatively.
David Foster Wallace added a level of difficulty here in Infinite Jest when he imagined an “Entertainment” so enthralling people became addicted to watching it. Opinions diverge on that novel, but I am firmly in the camp that believes he handled it perfectly.
If there’s a metaphor more useful than The Simpsons’ Fireworks Factory, I have not encountered it.
The smart thing to do is handle it like Lost did with its fictional group Drive Shaft. Instead of making their one hit You All Everybody a work of genius, they specifically positioned it as simply a popular song by a one-hit-wonder band. That made suspending disbelief much easier.
If there’s a more appropriate slogan for professional writers, frankly I’d like to hear it.
This reminds me of a childhood anecdote: When I was small, I saw an advertisement for Magic Cow cups. These were, in reality, powdered mixes you were supposed to put in milk to jazz it up. Being a well-known idiot and disappointment to my family, I thought these were decliious milkshakes somehow delivered via the mail. I prevailed upon my parents to send money for these things, waited like 6 weeks, and was incredibly disappointed when they arrived and there were no milkshakes in sight. This is the calibre of intellect you’re dealing with, people.
Failing while Succeeding is, by sheer coincidence, the title of my memoir.