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An engaging little middlebrow page-turner.
Jacob is a creative writing MFA teacher and a literary has-been, unable to recreate a fraction of the success of the debut novel that put him on the map, and thus, he is relegated to teaching not-very-good-writers who he obviously doesn't like very much. But then, one of his (very secretive) students tells him the plot for the novel he's writing—a plot so good "the worst writer in the world couldn't mess it up," a plot so good that it's destined for the bestseller list and a big movie deal and eternal fame. Jacob's burning up with jealousy. Then: the student dies. No heirs, no remaining family, no drafts anyone can find.
So Jacob decides to write and publish the story himself. While lying to everyone about where the idea came from.
You have to swallow the premise—the fantastical idea that there are plots so good and so shocking that they're obviously destined for greatness—but, once you've done that, the drama clips along at a satisfying rate. The first half is a compellingly claustrophobic portrait of an endearingly awful guy desperately ignoring the voice in his head telling him he should just come clean (or have just played it straight from the start! been honest about his inspiration!), because his own ego and myopia gets in the way. The second half, when he starts getting strange threats from someone who claims to know the truth, is an unputdownable romp to try and track down that person, and how they know. (At one point I fell asleep in bed reading, woke up two hours before my alarm by chance, immediately propped the book up to start reading it again because I had to know how it ended, and... then fell asleep again :P The will was strong but the body was weak!)
I plucked this one because my mom's book club was reading it, and while I'm not sure it lends itself particularly well to that forum—there's not a ton to discuss, other than, "who's the blackmailer," which I found pretty easy to guess well before the end—it'd certainly make a decent beach read.
Jacob is a creative writing MFA teacher and a literary has-been, unable to recreate a fraction of the success of the debut novel that put him on the map, and thus, he is relegated to teaching not-very-good-writers who he obviously doesn't like very much. But then, one of his (very secretive) students tells him the plot for the novel he's writing—a plot so good "the worst writer in the world couldn't mess it up," a plot so good that it's destined for the bestseller list and a big movie deal and eternal fame. Jacob's burning up with jealousy. Then: the student dies. No heirs, no remaining family, no drafts anyone can find.
So Jacob decides to write and publish the story himself. While lying to everyone about where the idea came from.
You have to swallow the premise—the fantastical idea that there are plots so good and so shocking that they're obviously destined for greatness—but, once you've done that, the drama clips along at a satisfying rate. The first half is a compellingly claustrophobic portrait of an endearingly awful guy desperately ignoring the voice in his head telling him he should just come clean (or have just played it straight from the start! been honest about his inspiration!), because his own ego and myopia gets in the way. The second half, when he starts getting strange threats from someone who claims to know the truth, is an unputdownable romp to try and track down that person, and how they know. (At one point I fell asleep in bed reading, woke up two hours before my alarm by chance, immediately propped the book up to start reading it again because I had to know how it ended, and... then fell asleep again :P The will was strong but the body was weak!)
I plucked this one because my mom's book club was reading it, and while I'm not sure it lends itself particularly well to that forum—there's not a ton to discuss, other than, "who's the blackmailer," which I found pretty easy to guess well before the end—it'd certainly make a decent beach read.
