The Sequel: A Novel (The Book Series, 2)
“solid, darkly fun . . .”
Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2021 literary mystery/suspense novel, The Plot, chronicles the sudden, stunning success (and just as sudden death) of one Jacob Finch Bonner.
The story opens in the 2010s, several years after the moderate critical and commercial success of his first novel. Having failed to continue the momentum of that success, Jake has landed in “the special purgatory for formerly promising writers, from which so few of them ever emerged”: teaching at an MFA program, specifically the low-residency program at the (fictional) Ripley College in Vermont.
Of all the students who move through the program—most of whom are unpromising—one insufferable young man tells Jake about an idea for a novel, an idea that is “a sure thing.” Hearing the plot outlined, Jake knows the concept, if ever executed (so to speak), will be an enormous success.
That MFA cohort graduates and moves on; Jake continues languishing in the literary hinterlands, resentfully regarding from afar peers and former colleagues. When he learns by chance that the student died a few years after the program without having published his work-in-progress, Jake thinks himself in the clear to adapt the concept (with details changed), and the book becomes a major sensation—New York Times bestseller, book club pick by Oprah and other celebrities, a truly hyperbolic success.
An anonymous antagonist going by the name Talented Tom (an allusion to the college and to Patricia Highsmith’s fictive sociopath Tom Ripley, which is explained in the novel) spurs Jake to investigate the inglorious life and suspicious death of his former student. He finds that the fictional plot he appropriated is not as fictional as he thought, and he meets an untimely end at the hands of someone near to him, the principal character in her own living fiction.
The Sequel opens about a year after the end of The Plot. Jake’s widow, Anna, making book tour appearances (and earning money) in Jake’s stead, decides, after countless asinine interview questions about the writing life, that writing a novel can’t be that hard. So she writes one. And The Afterword, her novel about the widow of a bestselling novelist who inexplicably kills himself, becomes a major success in its own right (although not on the gargantuan scale of Crib).
Anna, who knows more about Jake’s appropriated idea than anyone else presumed living, soon finds herself the target of ominous, anonymous messages indicating that at least one person may know who she really is and what she has done. She begins her own sleuthing, doing whatever she thinks necessary to prevent anyone learning about her past and to secure the life she believes she deserves.
The Sequel is a fast, engaging thriller, allowing readers to experience the dark enjoyment of watching Anna’s cold, sociopathic intelligence at work. The plot twists satisfy, although readers of The Plot (even those who did not guess Anna’s secret until the end) are not likely to find those in its follow-up as head-turning and surprising.
Where narration in The Plot was third-person limited, positioned close to Jake, it is positioned in proximity to Anna in The Sequel. Anna is a cruel, vengeful, vindictive, charming character, and putting the reader into her consciousness, making the reader share in her motives and resentments and thus inclined to take her side, makes for a morally disorienting experience. Readers may find themselves hoping Anna gets away with it and feeling conflicted each time she does.
The thrills and frissons are, however, somewhat diminished by some implausible events, such as Anna entering a gated community in the wealthy suburbs outside Athens, Georgia, and entering her adversary’s home without being stopped or even noticed; slipping past a gated community’s guardhouse in the guise of a jogging housewife might have been feasible at some time, but it’s hard to imagine it happening in 2019, when the novel is set. In spite of a few such shortcomings, though, The Sequel is an evilly fun read. The end, even more than that of the earlier book, seems to set up the possibility of further sequels, perhaps allowing Anna as many sequels as her predecessor Mr. Tom Ripley.
The movement and pacing of the novel overall are satisfying, but there are infelicities and missteps in the prose. Hanff Korelitz, who in many places demonstrates wit and a good sense of detail (as in a description of “makeup so thick it had caked into [a character’s] deep nasolabial folds”), disappointingly stoops to inelegant phrases typical of social media and text messages, such as “epic virtue signaling” and “humble brag.”
There are also a few instances of the increasingly prevalent misuse of “robust” where “extensive” is clearly meant, the lazily colloquial use of “super” as an adverb modifying “well-liked” where good words used properly would have been more mellifluous and more precise. Hanff Korelitz has a good ear and a good respect for the language (as in, to furnish another example, a description of a character’s overuse of cologne as “a miasma of misguided courtliness”), but the grating or inapt phrases do tend to detract from the novel’s qualities.
Chapter titles in The Sequel, although not wrongs on the order of the foregoing, are a bit perplexing. A section at the end of the book, after the acknowledgments, provides sources for each chapter title, all of which are the titles of sequels to well-known books, many of which are by contemporary authors (such as Stephen King, Richard Ford, Elizabeth Strout, and Elif Batuman), although Lewis Carroll and John Milton also receive citations. Taken individually, chapter headings such as “Ripley Under Ground” (from the sequel to The Talented Mr. Ripley) and “Bring Up the Bodies” (from the sequel to Wolf Hall) often strike a sardonic tone relevant to their respective chapters.
The Plot and The Sequel bear obvious resemblances to Highsmith’s Ripley novels (especially the similarities of Anna’s and Ripley’s big cons), and there are explicit references to Tom Ripley in the narrative, but it is not at all clear what most of these sequels (such as Chaim Potok’s The Promise, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, and Erica Jong’s How to Save Your Own Life) have to do with the chapters in The Sequel for which they furnish the titles or The Sequel as a whole except for the fact of their also being sequels.
Overall, The Sequel is a solid, darkly fun follow-up to The Plot. Its shortcomings, though they do leave a bad aftertaste, are not so bad as to outweigh the novel’s many good qualities. And at the end, when Anna seems to have eliminated all possibility of having her past and her deeds revealed, readers are left eagerly wondering what havoc Anna will next wreak.