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.

Books and Libraries take center stage in this epic narrative which crosses time and space over the course of 600 pages. The title comes from a lost ancient Greek novel written by Antonius Diogenes, about a shepherd who turns into an ass, then a fish, then a crow, to try to find the hidden paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land. The author tells us that this fictitious novel is based on a true 1800 year old work by Diogenes called “Wonders Beyond Thule” of which only a few papyrus fragments remain.

Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together five characters from a span of 5 centuries. Anna, a restless orphan stuck in an embroidery shop in Constantinople in the 1450s befriends an elderly scholar and learns ancient Greek. At night she sneaks out of the shop and into an ancient monastery where she discovers the Cloud Cuckoo Land codex. Omeir, a young farmer with a love of animals but an unfortunate split lip is enlisted as an ox driver in the Sultan’s army in the siege of Constantinople.

Zeno, an orphaned child is befriended by librarians in Lakeport Idaho. During the Korean War he becomes a prisoner of war, and befriends Rex, a spirited English scholar who shares his love of ancient texts and tried to teach him Greek. After the war, Zeno comes to Cloud Cuckoo Land through Rex’s book of “Lost Texts”, where Cloud Cuckoo Land is featured prominently.

Seymour is a troubled child living with a single mom Bunny on the edge of poverty. Apparently on the autistic spectrum, he starts to wear “ear defenders” which block out the chaos of the world around him and help him function. His childhood hero is “Trustyfriend” a Great Grey Owl, who presides over the woods behind his home on the edge of Lakeport. As developers encroach on the town, Trustyfriend’s woods are razed for condos and one day Seymour discovers Trustyfriend’s wing at the side of the road. This traumatic event catapults Seymour into a future of radical environmentalism.

Konstance is sealed away the Argos, an interplanetary space ship destined for a planet 592 years away. On her 10th birthday she learns that she will never make it to their destination, and that the mission of all on the Argo is to preserve the life and culture of Earth for future generations. Passengers of the Argos pass time in the “Library”, an AI world which captures all of the cultural artifacts on earth, and controlled by a computer “Sybil”. In the library Konstance is drawn to the “Atlas;” an AI map of world where she can physically explore the land she never knew. When a mysterious virus breaks out on the ship, Konstance seeks clues in the Atlas where she finds hidden code where images of the true devastated Earth environment seep through.

It was a bit of a struggle to get through the beginning of the novel, with its 5 disparate characters and odd quotes from the ancient Greek novel. But unlike a typical narrative diagram, this one is like a spiral, with the circle becoming ever closer as the novels proceeds. In the second half the resolution feels inevitable, and I barreled through to quickly to the end.

The novel speaks to the power of story telling, and the important but difficult task of preserving stories. Environmentalism also weaves its way through the book in interesting ways, such that the importance of preserving stories is analogous to the importance of listening to and preserving the natural world around you. There is much to think about and I’m looking forward to our book group discussion.

I rate this book 4.5👍 out of 5👍.