It is not surprising that a novel called The Plot is a narrative of stories within stories. Our protagonist, Jake Finch Bonner, is a writer who’s struggling to follow up his first successful novel (reviewed as New and Noteworthy by the New York Times). He gets a teaching job at a middling writing program in Vermont, where he advises equally middling writers. The send up of the writing and publishing world, a backdrop throughout the novel, is hilarious. Then one year Jake has a new student, Evan Parker, a blond strapping and self assured writer convinced he has a Plot which cannot fail.

It takes some time for Jake to pry the plot from Evan, and Jake grudgingly admits that it’s a winner, reinforcing his own self loathing and doubt. The details of Evan Parker’s plot are not shared with the reader, but are slowly revealed over the course of the novel through brief excerpts. In the first excerpt a single mother/accidental parent contends with a fiercely independent daughter trying to leave home.

When we next catch up with Jake, he has lost his job in Vermont, as the writing program has shut down, and Jake has cobbled together a living through free lance editing and a part time gig as the operations manager at Adlon Center for the Creative Arts. There is no progress on his next novel.

One day at Adlon a particular demanding and self assured writer storms into Jake’s office with a litany of complaints. The encounter triggers Jake’s memory of his first meeting with Evan Parker, and he begins to wonder what happened to Evan Parker’s novel and start digging around the internet looking for him. Instead of finding the successful novel and screenplay, Jake discovers that Evan Parker has died.

Jake pokes around to see if he can dig up any reference to Evan Parker’s novel and decides to go ahead and write it himself. Jake’s novel achieves all the accolades Evan was so sure it would receive, including movie rights from Steven Spielberg. But Jake’s success is tempered by his underlying dread that his theft will be revealed. Although Jake has only borrowed the plot and otherwise written a fully original novel, he cannot get over his feeling of guilt. The novel ruminates on these questions of originality and plagiarism in thoughtful ways.

“Good writers borrow, great writers steal, Jake was thinking. That ubiquitous phrase was attributed to T. S. Eliot (which didn’t mean Eliot hadn’t, himself, stolen it!), but Eliot had been talking, perhaps less than seriously, about the theft of actual language—phrases and sentences and paragraphs—not of a story, itself. Besides, Jake knew, as Eliot had known, as all artists ought to know, that every story, like single work of art—from the cave paintings to whatever was playing at the Park Theater in Cobleskill to his own puny books—was in conversation with every other work of art: bouncing against its predecessors, drawing from its contemporaries, harmonizing with the patterns. All of it, paintings and choreography and poetry and photography and performance art and the ever-fluctuating novel, was whirling away in an unstoppable spin art machine of its own. And that was a beautiful, thrilling thing.”

The reader is not surprised when the dreaded email arrives: “you are a thief.” What is surprising is the journey this prompts for Jake and the full Plot of Evan Parker’s novel (as rewritten by Jake Bonner) that is revealed.

At this point I can only urge you to read the book because further detail would be a spoiler. I rate The Plot 5👍 out of 5👍. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking read.