Title: The Plot
Rating: 3 Stars
The Plot tells the story of Jacob Finch Bonner. From a very early age, he always wanted to be a writer. His first novel received significant critical acclaim and positioned him as an up and coming young author. From then on, he struggled. His second effort was a collection of loosely linked short stories that was barely published with mediocre sales.
His third and fourth novels weren’t even published. Now in his later thirties, his writing career is at a standstill. No longer able to afford living in Manhattan, he’s taken a teaching position at a pretty low rent MFA program just to pay his bills. He barely even pretends to write anymore. It looks like his life path is defined for him. He’s going to be a second rate teacher working at second rate institutions.
One year, a student named Evan Parker appears. Rude and seemingly disinterested in writing, Bonner is confused why Parker is even attending the program. Parker claims that writing is irrelevant if you have a good enough plot. Bonner of course disagrees. In conversation, Parker, at first hesitantly, spells out the idea of the book that he wishes to write. Spellbound, Bonner, to his bitter chagrin, knows that the plot is a sure fire winner and that Parker, as obnoxious and uninterested as he is, is sure to be a best selling author.
Years pass by. Occasionally Bonner wonders why he hasn’t seen Parker’s book published. Bonner is at last inspired to do some research. He discovers that Parker actually died of a drug overdose a few short months after the they talked. He apparently has no family. There is no evidence that anyone knows about the book that Parker was planning to write.
After just a bit of hesitation, Bonner leaps at the opportunity. He takes Parker’s plot and makes it his own. As expected, the book becomes wildly successful. It goes through many printings. It has been optioned off to an A-List film director. Bonner is on a national book tour full of adoring fans. He has the life that he has dreamed about.
That is, until an e-mail pops up in his inbox accusing him of fraud. Someone out there knows about Parker and his plot and that Bonner has stolen it.
Who is this person? What are they capable of? Will Bonner’s secret be exposed?
At the same time that we are discovering this, excerpts from Bonner’s best selling book are included, so we have a book within a book.
This is far as I’m going to go, plot wise. As should be expected, there are plot twists both within the book as well as within the book within.
The book was well written. It was clever. I enjoyed reading it. I’d recommend that other people read it.
So why 3 stars?
There are a couple of reasons. First of all, Bonner’s not that great of a protagonist. He’s a pretty bland guy. He’s actually kind of obnoxious as well. Not quite obnoxious enough to be an anti-hero, but obnoxious enough that I didn’t really care what happened to him.
Secondly, the stakes just don’t seem all that high to me. So what if he wrote a novel based upon the plot that a dead guy told him? It’s not plagiarism. He didn’t steal his words. Writers are understandably paranoid about sharing their plots with others, but again, Parker is dead. He doesn’t care.
Bonner keeps referring to the real world case of James Frey. That’s a bad comparison because Frey was accused of fabricating chunks of his memoir. That is a completely different thing than what Bonner did.
It seems to me that, worse comes to worse, Bonner can say, yeah, this dead guy that never wrote a book told me a plot that I used to write my own book. Embarrassing sure, but not career ending. I just don’t see the hazard here.
Finally, and this is the big one. I enjoy reading mysteries with twists and turns. However, I’m not at all good at predicting these twists and turns. I’m OK with that because it makes my reading experience that much more enjoyable.
In The Plot, the twists, both within the Bonner plot as well as in his book plot, were so obvious that even I picked up on them well before they happened. Considering that the whole point of The Plot is that Parker had some sublimely insane plot that was a surefire gang buster, the fact that it seemed obvious did not work in its favor.
In my opinion, Parker’s plot would have been better handled as a MacGuffin. For those not familiar, a MacGuffin is a plot device that’s critical but fades in importance. I don’t think that Parker’s plot should have been ever spelled out. The reader should have been left wondering what this amazing plot could have been. Of course, doing so would have changed the entire book because knowledge of the plot is what drives the plot centered around Bonner.
When a plot is sold so strongly, I would have liked it to have been a bit stronger.
dorkenstein 