Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel The Plot was a 2021 bestseller about a bestseller; The Sequel is, that's right, The Plot's sequel. Korelitz has winking, spoofy, devilish fun with the business and ethics of novel writing in this cat-and-mouse turned mouse-and-cat literary thriller.
Anna Williams-Bonner, known to readers of The Plot as the widow of novelist Jacob Finch Bonner, is now the executor of his estate and a published author herself. She has written a novel whose storyline, a New York Times profile offers, parallels its author's own: the book charts "a brief but loving marriage, a husband's devastating suicide, and finally a slow and painful return to purpose and life." Actually, Jake was no suicide: Anna has gotten away with murder.
One day at a bookshop, where she's signing preorders of her novel, Anna receives a note suggesting that her evildoing, which has hardly been limited to killing Jake, is "not forgotten." This development sets off a tremendous plot in a novel in which a publishing industry insider tells Anna, "In general, the level of literary approbation tends to decline with the presence of an actual plot"; at another meta moment, Anna says of sequels, "They're never as good as the first book, are they?" The Sequel, which, for the record, brushes up against the brilliance of its antecedent, poses other writerly questions less explicitly, among them, who owns a story? Not in question: whether a thoroughly unlikable character can sustain readers' interest across the length of a Jean Hanff Korelitz novel. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer