The Plot

“‘I just wanted to say how much I like your work.’ Jake felt, and noted, the physical sensation that generally accompanied this sentence, which he still did hear from time to time.”

At Ripley, when a poet named Alice flirts with Jake, his susceptibility to literary flattery foreshadows how Anna is able to get close to him so quickly. Jake’s bodily pleasure at being complimented will make him an easily duped mark.

“Stories, of course, are common as dirt. Everyone has one, if not an infinity of them, and they surround us at all times whether we acknowledge them or not. Stories are the wells we dip into to be reminded of who we are, and the ways we reassure ourselves that, however obscure we may appear to others, we are actually important, even crucial, to the ongoing drama of survival: personal, societal, and even as a species.”

This passage speaks to the power of storytelling. It offers answers to why people tell stories: why people write. For fiction writers, the story is often the most compelling aspect of the writing process because it offers methods for defining identity and interconnectedness.

“It had also been years since he’d given any thought at all to the institutionalized teaching of creative writing. He hadn’t missed it.”

Jake questions the usefulness of MFA programs and formal training in the writing process after becoming a successful author and no longer working in academia. His passion resides in crafting sentences himself, not helping other people with their sentence-craft.

“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.”

Jake avoids taking any action against his online stalker, paralyzed with passivity in the face of conflict and threats. The internet has changed the lives of writers: They rarely can remain anonymous or unapproachable since the invention of social media.

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

This Twitter message from Anna, under the pseudonym @TalentedTom, reveals her goals to destroy Jake and steal his money as his widow. Talented Tom’s tweets imply that Jake stole from Evan: “another writer.” In fact, the twist is that Evan first stole the plot from Anna’s life.

“Well, this, to be fair, is a very distinctive plot.”

Jake’s publishers side with him when they find out about Talented Tom accusing Jake of plagiarism. While they assert a plot cannot be stolen, they acknowledge that the plot of his novel, Crib, is unusual; they’ve apparently never heard of the many examples in fiction where someone maliciously steals another’s identity.

“Some underachiever might have keyboard courage but if he states or implies a provably false statement of fact, not just an opinion, that’s defamation.”

Talented Tom’s (supposedly false) online claims bring up an interesting catch about the plot Jake and Evan use. Authors can write about the facts of someone’s life without legal trouble. Once Jake discovers Evan took his plot from real life, Jake wants to create a piece about the facts behind his fiction, and has little moral issue with this. Because those facts include murder, Anna wants to keep anyone from writing about them. In the end, after killing both Evan and Jake, she keeps the story in the realm of fiction.

“Anyone who accomplishes anything in this life has someone out there dying to tear him down.”

When Jake’s publishers encounter Talented Tom, they decide the anonymous troll is envious of Jake’s success: All authors experience online harassment. Before the reveal that Tom is actually a murderous woman whose life is fodder for Jake’s writing, their lack of concern speaks to how technology has affected anyone successful.

“She’d also joined a group at her church that traveled to women’s health clinics to harass the patients and staff.” 

In Crib (the novel-within-the-novel), Samantha’s parents force her to carry her teenage pregnancy to term and raise a child. Her mother becomes a vehement pro-life advocate, trying to control other women as she controlled her daughter. Later in the novel, Anna says Jake represented her experience of forced motherhood accurately; this quote explains some of Anna’s motivations for murder.

“For a very uncomfortable moment, he wondered if he was about to cry.”

Jake’s masculinity is extremely fragile, as evidence by his discomfort with behavior coded as feminine. The avoidance leads to Jake not only being unable to express his emotions, but also misreading the emotions of others. He is pathologically unable to correctly tell real flattery from fake.

“I prefer to read history and write fiction.”

Martin Purcell, who lives near where Evan and Anna grew up in Vermont, is a Ripley College alum that Jake (incorrectly) suspects is Talented Tom because of his friendship with Evan. When Jake meets Martin under the pretense of talking about Martin’s writing, Martin says this common dismissal of writers who only want to generate ideas: a tension that speaks to Korelitz’s theme of the writing process.

“He had allowed himself to imagine, for one tantalizing moment, that there was a box of Evan Parker’s manuscript pages, still somewhere beneath this roof. But that was quickly dashed.”

When Jake enters the home where Evan grew up, he sees the extensive renovations by the current residents and imagines stumbling on valuable clues underneath the changes. However, this is wishful thinking—Anna destroyed the pages Jake looks for long before.

“He was far more than adept at constructing untruths on the page, when he had all the time in the world to get the fabrication right.”

As Jake bumbles his way through investigating Evan’s family, we see that unlike Anna, who is able to charm everyone in Jake’s life, Jake only easily connects with people who admire his writing (or him as a famous author), such as the couple who bought Evan’s family home. In person, Jake struggles to lie and has trouble reading people.

“Ask your plagiarist husband to tell you about Evan Parker, the real author of Crib.”

Anna composes this letter from Talented Tom to herself to manipulate Jake into confessing how much Talented Tom has affected him. Tom’s pseudonymous attacks become the supposed reason for Jake’s suicide, so crafting a letter from Tom to Anna is a way of building up her apparent innocence. Also, Anna mentions Talented Tom’s attacks in the suicide note she writes as Jake after administering a lethal dose of drugs to Jake.

“Was Jake really supposed to throw a plot like that into some other writer’s grave? Any novelist would understand what he’d done. Any novelist would have done exactly the same!”

Jake’s only spiritual belief—the writer’s obligation to use a good idea or lose it—informs this passage, developing Korelitz’s theme of the ownership of stories.

“Samantha [...] sat there [...] watching the crumpled thing that had once, long ago, been Maria, her daughter. And what a waste that had been. What an exercise in pointlessness, bringing a human being into the world, only to find oneself more alone than before, more thwarted, more disappointed, more perplexed about what anything meant.” 

This passage from Crib, Jake’s novel within Korelitz’s novel, describes how Jake imagines Evan’s sister felt about motherhood. However, Jake’s understanding of filicide is flawed: He believes a teenager forced into bearing and raising a child would still love the unwanted child, which can be read as a form of misogyny, due to gendered ideas about motherhood.

“Here’s the statement I’ll be releasing if you don’t get out of my life and keep your mouth shut. Any corrections before it goes out? ‘In 2012 a young woman named Rose Parker died violently at the hands of her own mother, who then stole her identity, appropriated her scholarship at the University of Georgia, and has been living as her daughter ever since. She is currently harassing a well-known author, but she really ought to be famous in her own right.’”

Jake finally replies to Talented Tom, revealing everything he has learned. The irony of this passage is the piece of information that Jake is missing: Rose’s mother is no longer living as Rose, but has switched identities once again, and become Anna. When Jake sends this to Talented Tom, he is actually sending it to Anna, revealing that she still has time to kill him before he gets all the facts straight and that he does not suspect her.

“Suddenly, Anna was laughing. Her laugh was musical: light and sweet. She laughed as if all of that—the soup, the teacher, the mom who’d driven her car into a lake in Idaho—was some of the funniest stuff she had ever heard.”

Anna abandons her charade and takes a moment for a classic evil villain laugh. Jake has already eaten her drugged soup and no help is forthcoming, so Anna reveals that the story she told Jake about her childhood in Idaho was a lie. However, Anna’s laugh sounding “sweet” highlights how Jake, drugged, still cannot consider his wife could be evil.

“Maybe you’ve got some gender blindness about motherhood, like it’s impossible for a mother to do that. Fathers, sure, no one bats an eye if they kill one of their kids, but do the same thing while in possession of a uterus and barn: the world explodes.”

This passage speaks to Jake’s opinions about his wife and women in general. The murderer in Jake’s novel only commits a crime of passion: one without planning or premeditation. Anna, on the other hand, plans multiple murders. Murderous sociopathy, she argues, is generally gendered as male—but shouldn’t be.

“That asshole actually managed to write almost two hundred pages. Of my story. And don’t think he was doing it for himself, either. This wasn’t some inner exploration through creative writing, trying to find his voice or understand the pain at the center of his family of origin. I found publication contests, lists of agents, the dude even had a subscription to Publishers Weekly. He knew what he was doing.”

Evan only told Jake the outline of his plot, but Anna found Evan’s first draft for a novel. Evan’s complete disinterest in the writing process and writing communities contrasts with Jake’s devotion to the craft of making sentences. In the end, Anna does not differentiate between Evan’s purely monetary motivation and Jake’s feelings of responsibility to the magical power of a good story: She kills both of them.

“As your widow and your literary executor I’ll do everything I can to manage your estate prudently, because that’s my duty and, I think you’ll also agree, my right.”

Anna’s long-term plan of becoming Jake’s widow allows her to access the money he made by fictionalizing her life. Moreover, after he dies, she takes control of his words. This revenge strikes at Jake’s deep fears about his immortal literary reputation, which Anna makes sure to tell Jake.

“I’ve learned so much about writers. You’re a strange kind of beast, aren’t you, with your petty feuds and your fifty shades of narcissism? You act like words don’t belong to everyone. You act like stories don’t have real people attached to them.”

Before Anna reveals herself as Talented Tom, she seems to be outside the world of writing and publishing. Someone without Jake’s spiritual devotion to writing or a publisher’s monetary investment in books can articulate the insular nature of the writing community as an echo chamber. Anna argues that stories belong to the people who lived them, rather than to artists.

“His mental status was that he wanted it all to stop. But at the same time, he was feeling that he would still scream if only he could figure out how.”

Jake’s writerly thoughts and inner monologue dominate most of Korelitz’s novel. However, once Anna drugs him, he loses control of the narrative. In his last moments, he is unable to talk or even think clearly. This represents not only Anna’s sadism and sociopathy, but also how she takes back her story by eliminating Jake’s voice.