The Plot by Jean Korelitz (digital book reader txt) 📗

me this weird tweet about you.” So far it hadn’t happened. When Anna came home from work, or met him for dinner after yoga, or spent the day with him wandering the city, their talk was about anything and everything but the most consequential thing in Jake’s life. Apart from her, of course.

Each morning after she left for work he sat paralyzed at his desk clicking back and forth from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, Googling himself every hour or so to see if anything had broken through, taking the temperature of his own alarm to see whether he was afraid, or merely afraid of being afraid. Each chime announcing a new email in his in-box made him jump, as did each beep of his Twitter alert and the bell Instagram rang when someone tagged him.

I know I’m the last person on the planet to read #Crib @Jacob-FinchBonner, but I wanna thank everyone for NOT TELLING ME WHAT HAPPENS COS I WAS LIKE WHAAAAAA????!

Recommended by Sammy’s mom: #Pachenko (sp?), #TheOrphan-Train, #Crib. Which do I read first?

Finished crib by @jacobfinchbonner. It wuz eh. Next: #thegoldfinch (man its loooooong)

He thought more than once of hiring a professional (or maybe just somebody’s teenage kid) to try to figure out who owned the Twitter account, or TalentedTom@gmail.com, or at least what general part of the world these messages were coming from, but the idea of bringing another person into his personal hell felt impossible. He thought of filing some kind of complaint with Twitter, but Twitter had allowed a president to suggest female senators were giving him blowjobs in exchange for his support—did he really think the platform would lift a finger to help him? At the end of the day he couldn’t bring himself to do anything at all: direct, indirect, or even just evasive. Instead, he retreated again and again into a baseless idea that if he continued to ignore this ordeal it would one day, somehow, cease to be real, and when that came to pass he would seamlessly return to a version of his life in which no one—not his parents, or his agent, or his publishers, or his thousands upon thousands of readers, or Anna—had any reason to suspect what he’d done. Each morning he woke into some utterly irrational notion that it might all just … stop, but then a new speck of darkness would emerge from his computer screen and he would find himself crouching before some terrible approaching wave, waiting to drown.

CHAPTER SIXTEENOnly the Most Successful Writers

Then, in February, Jake noticed that the Twitter bio included a new link to Facebook. With a now familiar surge of dread, he clicked on the link:

Name: Tom Talent

Works at: The Restoration of Justice in Fiction

Studied at: Ripley College

Lives In: Anytown, USA

From: Rutland, VT

Friends: 0

His maiden post was short, definitely not sweet, and thoroughly to the point:

Blindsided by that big twist in Crib? Here’s another one: Jacob Finch Bonner stole his novel from another writer.

And for some reason Jake would never understand, this was the post that began, at last, to metastasize.

At first, the responses were muted, dismissive, even scolding:

WTF?

Dude, I thought it was overrated, but you shouldn’t accuse somebody like that.

Wow, jealous much, loser?

But then, a couple of days later, Jake’s Twitter alert picked up a repost on the account of a minor book blogger, who added a question of her own:

Anybody know what this is about?

Eighteen people responded. None of them did. And for a couple of days he was able to maintain a desperate hope that this, too, would pass. Then, the following Monday, his agent called to ask if he was free later in the week for a meeting with the team at Macmillan, and there was something in her voice that told him this would not be about the second round of the paperback tour or even the new novel, which had now been scheduled for the following autumn. “What’s up?” he said, already knowing the answer.

Matilda had a very distinctive way of delivering terrible news as if it were an interesting insight that had just occurred to her. She said: “Oh, you know what? Wendy mentioned that reader services got a weirdo message from somebody who says you’re not the author of Crib. Which means you’ve really made it now. Only the most successful writers get these wackos.”

Jake couldn’t make a sound. He looked at the phone; it was in front of him, on the coffee table, with the speaker on. Finally, he managed a strangled: “What?”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Everybody who accomplishes anything gets this. Stephen King? J. K. Rowling? Even Ian McEwan! Some crazy guy once accused Joyce Carol Oates of flying a zeppelin over his house so she could photograph what he was writing on his computer.”

“That’s insane.” He took a breath. “But … what did the message say?”

“Oh, something really specific like your story doesn’t belong to you. They just wanted to bring Legal in to have a little chat about it. Get us all on the same page.”

Jake nodded again. “Okay, great.”

“Ten tomorrow okay with you?”

“Okay.”

It took every fiber of his will not to immediately replicate his self-quarantine of the previous fall: unplugged phone, fetal position, cupcakes, Jameson. But this time he knew he’d shortly have to present himself in some quasi-responsible condition, and that impeded freefall, or at least irreversible freefall. When he met Matilda in the lobby of his venerable publisher the following morning he still felt impaired: woozy and malodorous, in spite of the fact that he’d forced himself into the shower only an hour earlier. The two of them went up in the elevator together to the fourteenth floor, and Jake, as he followed his editor’s assistant down the corridor, couldn’t help thinking about his previous visits to these offices: for a celebration in the aftermath of the auction, for the intense (but still thrilling!) editorial sessions, for the mind-blowing first meeting with the PR and