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

famous MFA program before he had). He heard from Bruce O’Reilly in Maine (Man, what is this moronic trash?) and from a number of his former coaching clients. He heard from Alice Logan at Hopkins, who helpfully listed a number of plagiarism scandals from the land of poetry and mentioned that she and her new husband were expecting. He heard from his parents, who were offended on his behalf, and several of his MFA classmates, one of whom countered with his own stalker: She decided my second novel was a codebook about our relationship. Which didn’t exist, incidentally. Don’t worry, they go away.

At around four that afternoon he heard from Martin Purcell in Vermont.

Someone posted it on our Ripley Facebook group, he wrote in an email. Do you have any idea who’s saying this stuff?

I was thinking, maybe, you? Jake thought. But naturally he said no such thing.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 71–73

Almost exactly two years later, Samantha’s father collapsed in the parking lot of the central maintenance office at Colgate University and was dead before the ambulance arrived. The biggest change in Samantha’s life, following this event, was an abrupt decline in financial security and the fact that her mother started obsessing over some woman her father had been sleeping with, apparently for years. (Why she’d waited until her husband was dead to reveal all this made no sense, at least not to Samantha. It was too late to do anything about it now, wasn’t it?) On the other hand, Samantha got her late father’s car, a Subaru. That was a big help.

Her daughter, Maria, by then, was doing all of the normal things, like walking and talking, and one or two things Samantha considered not normal, like saying the names of letters everywhere she went and pretending not to hear Samantha when Samantha was speaking. She had been, from her first days of life, a malcontent, a blusterer, a pusher-away of other people (mainly Samantha, but also her two grandparents and the pediatrician). In due course she began kindergarten as a surly child in a corner with books, declining to parallel play (let alone cooperative play), interrupting the teacher with commentary when it was story time, refusing to eat anything but jelly and cream cheese on the heel of the supermarket loaf.

By then, all of Samantha’s former tenth-grade classmates had passed out of the crepe-paper-decorated gymnasium holding their rolled-up diplomas, and they’d scattered—a few to college, others to work, the rest to the wind. If she ran into one of them in the supermarket or at the Fourth of July parade along Route 20 she felt such a surge of fury that it rushed upward into her mouth and burned her tongue, and she had to grit her teeth together when she made polite conversation. A year after those classmates moved on, her original classmates—the ones she’d leapfrogged past as a sixth grader—also graduated, and all that anger seemed to go with them. What was left after that was a kind of low-grade disappointment, and as the years continued to pass she lost even the power to remember what it was she was disappointed about. Her own mother was home less and less; Dan Weybridge—in the goodness of his heart or perhaps some festering sense of paternal responsibility—had upped her hours at the Family-owned-for-three-generations! College Inn, and she’d also joined a group at her church that traveled to women’s health clinics to harass the patients and staff. Samantha spent most of her time in the sole company of her daughter, and the care of an infant, then a toddler, then a young child expanded to fill every corner and moment of her days. She tended Maria like an automaton: feeding, bathing, dressing and undressing, losing ground with every passing day.

CHAPTER EIGHTEENAnother Day’s Lies

There were days when he could manage an hour or two of work on the new novel, but many more when he could not. Generally, after Anna left the apartment in the morning, Jake remained on the new kilim-covered couch Anna had chosen to replace its ratty predecessor, bouncing back and forth between his phone (Twitter, Instagram) and his laptop (Google, Facebook), checking and rechecking for new posts and tracking the malevolent ricochets of those posts he’d already seen, trapped and tortured and utterly incapable of finding his way out.

When the Macmillan group reconvened a couple of weeks later, this time via conference call, there was a certain amount of chagrin at TalentedTom’s response to the cease and desist, and a general dearth of other ideas to try. On the other hand, Roland the publicist reported that the book websites and bloggers seemed to have let the story pass, mainly because there wasn’t much for them to write without any details at all, and also, frankly, because the anonymous poster did sound like just the kind of person who comes out of the woodwork when someone writes a massively bestselling book. (Jake’s circumstances were also helped by a gloriously well-timed war between two novel-writing exes in Williamsburg, whose books—her first, his third—had been published within weeks of each other, and together formed a mutually punitive indictment of their failed marriage, albeit with different villains.)

“Of course I wish we’d had a better outcome,” said the attorney, “but there’s always the possibility that this was his last hurrah. He knows he’s being watched now. He didn’t have to be all that careful before. Maybe he’ll decide it’s just not worth it.”

“I’m sure that’s the case,” said Wendy. To Jake’s ears she seemed to be straining for optimism. “And anyway, there’s about to be a brand-new book by Jacob Finch Bonner. What’s this dickwad going to do then? Accuse Jake of stealing every book he writes? The best thing for all of this nonsense is to get the new novel into production as soon as possible.”

Everyone agreed with that, and no one more so than Jake, who hadn’t been