In a follow-up to her runaway bestselling thriller The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz takes up the story of Anna Williams-Bonner, wife of The Plot’s protagonist and a literary antihero in her own right.
Hanff Korelitz shares why this book came as a surprise — even to herself — what it was like satirizing the publishing industry, and the reaction to the announcement of The Sequel.
By Jennifer Jackson
Did you ever think you would continue the story from your New York Times bestselling novel The Plot (2021)? When did the idea for The Sequel start to form?
When I was writing The Plot during the first months of the pandemic in 2020, it never once occurred to me that I would one day write a sequel. That in itself would come back to haunt me, because there were decisions I made in the writing of the first novel that would box me in when it was time to revisit those characters or situations. I remember one seemingly inconsequential line in The Plot that would have me tearing my hair out with The Sequel and required the assistance of not one but two experts in pharmacology! With so much emphasis on the final pages of The Plot, few of its readers were immediately concerned with what happens next, but over time I began to hear from fans of the novel who were curious. When I thought about the story’s (surviving) characters, I began to understand that their journeys were unfinished and that there were still so many unanswered questions about them. I mentioned to my agent that I was thinking of revisiting the characters — Anna in particular — in a sequel, and she grinned and said: “Yes. And we’re going to call it: The Sequel.”
The Sequel follows Anna Williams-Bonner, wife of The Plot’s protagonist Jacob Finch-Bonner, as she discovers her own literary success. How did the experience of writing from the perspectives of those two characters compare? Did you find one character harder or easier to write?
It was a pleasure to inhabit the mind of a person who has done such vigorously unsavory things. Why? Probably because I won’t be experiencing those behaviors in my real life, thank you very much! It’s an oddity I’ve always noticed as a reader, that we tend to root for the protagonist, no matter how awful they are, and that was a fascinating position to be in as a writer. In spite of what this protagonist does, what we actually witness them doing, we still kind of want them to succeed. It’s the superpower of fiction, to make us see the world through the eyes of people so (one hopes) different from ourselves.
As the author of eight previous novels, you have a unique inside view of the publishing industry. What was it like satirizing that world in your new novel?
I will say this for publishing: We who dwell within it are admirably good-natured about seeing ourselves satirized. Perhaps it’s because we understand what an anachronism the industry essentially is. In a modern world where people can publish their own written language, in multiple formats, with the push of a button, contemporary book publishing is still a 19th-century relic in which it may still take a year or more to get a manuscript to transform into a published book! We tolerate that, despite our natural human impatience, because we know there are still things worth waiting for, and we are fascinated by those who still work in book publishing, because we recognize our shared eccentricities. There’s just something about a…you know, book.
In The Plot, you dug into the concept of artistic license — and the sometimes moral gray area of inspiration, appropriation, and attribution. What themes did you set out to explore in The Sequel?
I laughed out loud when I happened upon the Michael Chabon quote that became my epigraph: All novels are sequels. It reiterates the point, which you allude to above, that no fiction exists in a vacuum; we who write it are part of a shared venture dating at least back to the 18th century, when the modern novel was novel, as in new. Even if we’re not writing a dedicated sequel, revisiting characters, settings, or situations in our previous work, a new story may rest on a shared idea of history, reality, or values. In the writing of this novel, I certainly had these ideas ricocheting around my head at all times, as well as the notion that understanding what happens next often requires understanding what happened before. It’s one reason I paid homage to other sequel writers in the chapter titles of the novel. (There’s a key at the back of the book!)
What has been the reaction so far when you’ve told people about this new book?
Unbridled excitement, I’m happy to say, often accompanied by a demand along the lines of: I need it right now. Like I said: People are so impatient, aren’t they?
