CANR
WORK TITLE: The Sequel
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jeanhanffkorelitz.com/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 281
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 16, 1961, in New York, NY; daughter of Burton I. (a doctor) and Ann (a therapist in social work) Korelitz; married Paul Muldoon (a writer), August 30, 1987; children: Dorothy, Asher.
EDUCATION:Dartmouth College, B.A. (cum laude), 1983; Clare College, Cambridge, M.A., 1985.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, poet, and educator. Freelance writer, 1979—. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., New York, NY, editorial assistant, 1987-88; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, instructor in Division of Continuing Education, 1990—. Editorial intern for Seventeen magazine, summer, 1979; summer intern of American Society of Magazine Editors for Glamour magazine, 1982; outside reader for Princeton University Office of Admission, 2006 and 2007; founder of Book the Writer.
AWARDS:Named among “top ten college women for 1983” by Glamour magazine; Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation fellow, 1985; Harper-Wood Studentship for Creative Writing and Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry, both from Cambridge University, both 1985; resident at MacDowell Colony, 1988 and 1989.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Vogue, Real Simple, More, Organic Style, Newsweek, O, the Oprah Magazine, Redbook, New York Times, Lifetime, and Travel and Leisure.
The film Admission, adapted from Korelitz’s novel of the same title, was released by Focus Features, 2013. You Should Have Known was adapted as a limited series on HBO called The Undoing, 2020; The Latecomer and The Plot have been optioned for television series.
SIDELIGHTS
Jean Hanff Korelitz is a novelist, poet, and educator. Her first novel, A Jury of Her Peers, is a “fast-moving legal thriller,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. Sybylla Muldoon, a legal aid attorney in New York, is assigned to defend Trent, a homeless man accused in the vicious stabbing death of a seven-year-old girl. Trent tells a fanciful story of being kidnapped and held against his will in a hospital. Though committed to the defense of her clients, Sybylla finds the story difficult to believe. However, when a mysterious implant is removed from Trent’s arm, it is discovered to be a time-release device full of LSD, lending credibility to Trent’s story and possibly explaining the once-gentle man’s seeming mental illness and descent into murder. Before she can use this information, however, Trent dies, and Sybylla becomes aware that she is in danger herself. Worse, her predicament seems linked to a recent nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court—Sybylla’s own father.
The Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book an “accomplished first novel.” Booklist contributor Margaret Flanagan concluded that the work is “a suspenseful and tautly rendered legal drama.” Korelitz’s “convincing characterization, vigorous prose and rapid-fire pacing deliver thoughtful entertainment along with the promised thrills,” the Publishers Weekly reviewer stated.
When Naomi Roth, the protagonist of The Sabbathday River, moved to Goddard, New Hampshire, in the 1970s, she was a VISTA volunteer looking to make a difference in the world. She stayed on to found a crafts cooperative. Decades later, she is still in Goddard and the cooperative is flourishing. Most popular among the cooperative’s products is the extraordinary embroidery work of Heather Pratt, a local girl haunted by an affair with a married man, Ashley Deacon, and the illegitimate child she had by him. When Naomi finds the stabbed body of an infant floating in the Sabbathday River, the townsfolk are quick to assume that it is Heather’s, and that she has slain her unwanted second child. Naomi steps forward to assist and defend Heather, convincing a newly arrived attorney, Judith Friedman, to defend the young woman in court. Heather is not the only one, however, who will be seared by the shocking and emotionally wrenching case.
Korelitz touches on many themes in the novel, noted Emily Melton in Booklist, including friendship, Judaism, and the unique experience of being a modern woman, but “it all works together brilliantly as a combination suspense thriller, courtroom drama, and cautionary morality tale.” “Smart and engrossing, this thriller addresses the complex morality behind its characters’ behavior with gravity and deep humanity,” observed a Publishers Weekly critic. Melton called the novel a “powerful tale of obsession and murder with a searing examination of human nature.”
Interference Powder is a fanciful tale about what happens when a young girl acquires the ability to rework the world as she chooses. When Nina Zabin receives a low grade on her social studies test, she copes by painting a picture of herself getting a perfect score. Finding a bottle of interference powder—ground-up mica that artists sometimes use to add shimmer to paintings—among her substitute teacher’s art supplies, she adds a bit of the substance to the painting of herself, and finds her world transformed. Her test score morphs into the perfect result found in her painting. To her surprise, Nina learns that her superior test performance now means she must represent her class in an all-school history contest. She thinks the powder will help her through, and it does, to a point, with unexpected and undesired results. Among the effects: Nina’s sudden inability to speak without the words coming forth in song, and the ability to cause a flood merely by crying. A child psychologist advises Nina to use the magic powder one last time, to fix all the problems it has caused.
“Despite the magical element, this is largely realistic fiction about knowing oneself and being true to one’s dreams,” observed Barbara Auerbach in the School Library Journal. Booklist contributor Todd Morning commented that “the novel has a winning central character and some funny scenes that many young readers will enjoy.”
In The White Rose, forty-eight-year-old Marian Kahn is married, a successful history professor at Columbia University, and the author of a best-selling book of popular history. Middle-aged steadfastness gives way to youthful indiscretion when she plunges into a sultry affair with twenty-six-year-old Oliver Stern, son of Marian’s oldest friend. Oliver, the owner of a popular flower shop called the White Rose, is thoroughly smitten with Marian, but when he meets Sophie Klein, a graduate student and heiress, his emotions and commitments clash. Complicating matters is the fact that Sophie is engaged to Barton Ochstein, Marian’s arrogant cousin. Marian and Oliver must contend with the disintegration of their still-strong emotional attachments while Sophie and Barton reconsider their commitment.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel “elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineation of complex emotions.” A Publishers Weekly writer concluded that, “even when their own comfort is at stake, Korelitz’s characters succumb to generous impulses, making this a satisfying, emotionally rich read.”
In 2006 and 2007 Korelitz served as an outside reader for Princeton University’s Office of Admission, and her experience evaluating undergraduate applicants’ essays, recommendations, and credentials informs her fourth novel, Admission. The book centers on Portia Nathan, age thirty-eight, a Dartmouth alumna who is an admissions officer at Princeton. She has lived for many years with Mark, an English professor whose affections seem recently to have cooled, and immerses herself wholeheartedly into her work, which she loves. Portia cares deeply about the aspiring students whose applications she reviews, and she believes passionately that admission to an elite school such as Princeton can change their lives and help them change the world. Portia, it would seem, should be fulfilled and happy. Yet the emotional pain she has stifled since her own undergraduate years gradually resurfaces in the novel, forcing her finally to confront the ramifications of the traumatic decision she had made. As Portia comes to realize, to admit means both to let in and to let out, and this second kind of admission frees her at last from the emotional rut in which she had been mired.
The action begins when Portia, on a fall recruiting trip in New England, visits the alternative Quest School. She meets a brilliant but poor student, Jeremiah, whom she decides to shepherd through the process of getting into Princeton. But she also encounters John Halsey, a Quest teacher who tells Portia that he is also a Dartmouth alumnus and knew her boyfriend, Tom, while they were students. This information clearly upsets Portia and provides a tense undercurrent to her subsequent lovemaking with John. Back home, Portia’s relationship with Mark also shows signs of curdling. Around the preparations for and aftermath of a dinner party, the couple argues and Mark eventually reveals that Susannah, his colleague in the English department, is pregnant with his child and that he is leaving Portia. Meanwhile, Portia’s cheerily altruistic mother announces that she has taken in a pregnant teenager and is thinking of adopting the child. This information bothers Portia deeply because, as Korelitz eventually reveals, Portia had become pregnant as an undergraduate, and her decision about this pregnancy has haunted her ever since.
Los Angeles Times contributor Wendy Smith wrote that “Korelitz takes a subject of consuming contemporary interest and uses it to frame a portrait of a wonderfully complex character confronting the choices she’s made and the damage she’s done, mostly to herself.” A writer for the Book Studio Web site made a similar point, observing that the novel tells many love stories, the most important of which is “Portia’s with herself. By making ‘admissions’ that don’t come easily or cleanly, Portia reconnects past with present and moves onto her future.” The result, said this reviewer, is a “beautiful and enriching” book.
Reviewers also enjoyed the novel’s insights into the college application and admission process. Chapters begin with excerpts from student application essays, which show the competitiveness, hope, and youthful faux-sophistication that can characterize these pieces. On the Mostly Fiction Web site, Eleanor Bukowsky praised Korelitz as a “fluid writer who provides a minutely detailed view of the whole admissions ordeal—especially what it costs parents and their children in angst, expense, and emotional upheaval.” Similarly, Bookslut Web site contributor Barbara J. King described Admission as “a thick universe of a novel that brings alive not only its central character but also the tense annual ritual endured by thousands of high school seniors who believe entry into an elite college will define their future.” And a writer for the New Yorker noted that the novel “gleams with acute insights” about the hidden truths of the admission process.
Bob Minzesheimer, writing in USA Today, commented that the book poses difficult questions concerning “privilege, entitlement and diversity.” Though Portia’s story is enjoyable, wrote Minzesheimer, the novel’s real strength is its revelation of what goes into the decision to admit, or reject, ivy league applicants who are all highly talented. As the reviewer pointed out, Princeton rejects more than ninety percent of applications; other elite colleges are similarly exclusive. Yet ambitious and high-achieving students continue to place their hopes in admission to a top school. Portia is keenly sensitive to the fact that it is impossible to admit every deserving student to Princeton, and that the rejection letters she sends out break thousands of hearts each year. She wishes she could tell them that, despite her unfavorable action on their applications, she admires their talent and drive and she knows that, at another school, they will achieve fine things. As Korelitz explained on her home page, her experience at Princeton showed her how much admissions officers care about the students whose fates they hold in their hands. A dean at Princeton had told the author that admissions officers tended to be “do-gooders,” and the author came to agree with this description. Writing Admission, she said, gave her the opportunity to explore questions of fairness, assimilation, success, tradition, diversity, and social class, and to realize that admissions officers who negotiate such issues are, for the most part, decent people who are “cursed with making these decisions.”
Korelitz published the novel You Should Have Known in 2013. Manhattan therapist Grace Reinhart Sachs lives a comfortable life and even becomes a person of some acclaim after publishing her first book on relationships. Shortly thereafter, her world falls apart. Police repeatedly question her over the death of another mother at the school her son attends. Her husband, away on business, is unreachable for days, casting further doubt into Grace’s sense of isolationism and trouble in her own relationship.
In a review in Washington Post Book World, Maureen Corrigan observed: “So vividly does Korelitz describe Grace’s upper-tier slice of Manhattan that when she and her son eventually flee to a hideaway in rural Connecticut, the novel loses some of its steam. But that’s a relatively minor criticism when weighed against the many pleasures it offers.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Susan Dominus explained that “in fiction, some details, the ones that tug almost imperceptibly at the reader’s subconscious, set the stage for an unexpected but inevitable truth; others merely make too obvious what will happen next. In You Should Have Known, both varieties show up in the service of a story that holds the soothing promise—despite all evidence to the contrary—of a happy-enough ending.”
Also writing in the New York Times Book Review, Janet Maslin pointed out that “Korelitz is able to glide smoothly from a watchful, occasional sinister comedy of New York manners into a much more alarming type of story.” Reviewing the novel in Entertainment Weekly, Amy Wilkinson found the plot to be “weighed down by superfluous detail.” Again writing in the Los Angeles Times, Smith commented that “Korelitz’s gift for enfolding a woman’s personal crisis within a sharply observed social context is as evident here as it was in her fine previous novel, Admission. ” A contributor to Publishers Weekly mentioned that “the plot borders on hyperbole” at times, before conceding that “that doesn’t take much away from this intriguing and beautiful book.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor labeled the novel as “a smart, leisurely study of midlife angst.”
(open new)Like Admission, The Devil and Webster is set in the world of academia. It protagonist, Naomi Roth, is the president of a progressive New England university called Webster College. When a Black professor, Nicholas Gall, is denied tenure, an increasing number of students begin suggesting that it is because of racism. Naomi knows that Gall plagiarized writing in a publication, but she is not legally allowed to share that fact. Meanwhile, Naomi must deal with tensions in her relationship with her daughter and a deception by one of Webster’s most charismatic students. Writing in TLS: Times Literary Supplement, Alice Hiller suggested: “Korelitz’s pacy, witty prose juggles Naomi’s many torments and tormentors, including an enraged Board of Trustees. But for all its suspenseful build-up of external pressures, the novel lives most strongly in Naomi’s battle with herself.” A Kirkus Reviews critic asserted: “Korelitz’s smooth prose and unfailing intelligence make this novel worth reading.” “The Devil And Webster is wittily on target about, among other things, social class and privilege, silencing, old school feminist ambivalence about power and Korelitz’s home subject, the insanity of the college admissions process,” commented Maureen Corrigan on the Fresh Air radio show.
The Plot centers on an act of plagiarism by a writer and professor for a middling college’s M.F.A. program named Jacob Finch Bonner. One of Jake’s students, an abrasive young man named Evan Parker, shares an idea for a novel with Jake and then unexpectedly dies. Jake decides to use Evan’s idea, thinking no one would know. The result, a novel called Crib, becomes a bestseller and leads to Jake meeting and falling for radio executive Anna. Just when everything seems perfect for Jake, he receives an anonymous email from someone claiming to the origin of his story. Ultimately, Jake realizes that the story is real and name from an acquaintance of Evan’s. A critic in Kirkus Reviews described The Plot as “gripping and thoroughly unsettling: This one will be flying off the shelves.” Jeff Vasishta, reviewer in BookPage, suggested: “Korelitz is an audacious writer who delivers on her promises. Her next big-screen adaptation surely awaits.” “Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is an addictive Russian nesting doll of a novel where every character’s hand fits neatly into someone else’s pocket,” asserted Elisabeth Egan in the New York Times Book Review.
The scion of a very wealthy family, Salo Oppenheimer is the main character of The Latecomer. As a young adult, Salo is involved in deadly automobile accident and survives, along with friend Stella. After the crash, Salo travels to Europe and becomes an art fanatic. Later, he marries a family friend, Johanna Hirsh and has triplets with her, all while amassing a valuable art collection. When he reunites with Stella, they fall in love and have a child together. Johanna learns of Salo’s second family and decides to use a fertilized egg to have another child, Phoebe, with Salo via surrogate. The triplets appear as young adults in the second part of the book, while Phoebe stars in the third and final section. In an interview with a contributor to the Celadon Books website, Korelitz discussed what she hoped readers would take away from the book, stating: “That people aren’t always who they appear to be. That houses can be like people in more ways than one. That Henry Darger isn’t the only Outsider Artist. That religion and politics sometimes serve the purpose of more intimate human needs. That sometimes we only learn to know a person after they’ve left us. That great art can heal our souls. That even families twisted by resentments and grievances can be brought back together by forgiveness and love.” A Kirkus Reviews critic described The Latecomer as “a satisfyingly twisty tale rooted in complex characterizations.” “The Latecomer is a character-driven story—a gripping doorstopper that you read in the bathtub until the water is cold,” asserted Michele Filgate in Publishers Weekly. Carla Jean Whitley, reviewer in BookPage, praised “both the rich plot and the nuanced characters.” In a lengthy assessment of the work in the New York Times Book Review, Allegra Goodman commented: “Collecting can be a source of pain as well as joy, a vehicle for wishful thinking as well as self-discovery. Exploring each case, Korelitz combines moral inquiry with social satire. Like Wharton, she invites the reader to reflect, even as she paints a picture of privilege. A sumptuously wrapped gift, The Latecomer is a Gilded Age novel for the 21st century.”
Characters from The Plot returns in the 2024 novel, The Sequel. In the book, Anna, whose story Jake stole for his novel, has married Jake and later killed him, staging his body to look as if his death were a suicide. Anna previously killed her parents, her brother, Evan, and her daughter. Now, she pretends to be Jake’s dutiful, mourning widow, touring the country to promote a book in which she tells her version of their story. When people begin questioning the details, Anna determines to take them out, too. A critic in Kirkus Reviews remarked that the book offered “wicked entertainment.” “This book will fly off the shelves,” predicted David Keymer in Library Journal.(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Armchair Detective, spring, 1997, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 148.
Atlantic, June, 2009, Jean Hanff Korelitz, review of Admission, p. 99.
Book, May 1, 1999, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 86.
Booklist, March 1, 1996, Margaret Flanagan, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 1121; March 15, 1999, Emily Melton, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 1291; October 15, 2003, Todd Morning, review of Interference Powder, p. 412; October 1, 2004, Carol Haggas, review of The White Rose, p. 310.
BookPage, May, 2021, Jeff Vasishta, review of The Plot, p. 19; June, 2022, Carla jean Whitley, review of The Latecomer, p. 22.
Chicago Tribune Books, April 11, 2009, Elizabeth Taylor, review of Admission, p. 13.
Childhood Education, summer, 2004, Linda Lewis-White, review of Interference Powder, p. 214.
Daily Telegraph (London), July 16, 2022, “The Undoing Author Comes Undone,” review of The Undoing, p. 15.
Entertainment Weekly, January 21, 2005, Jessica Shaw, review of The White Rose, p. 94; April 10, 2009, Leah Greenblatt, review of Admission, p. 59; March 19, 2014, Amy Wilkinson, review of You Should Have Known.
Fresh Air, March 22, 2017, “Smart, Satirical Devil and Webster Takes on College Identity Politics,” Maureen Corrigan, review of The Devil and Webster.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), August 14, 1999, review of The Sabbathday River, p. D15.
Guardian (London, England), July 4, 2014, Suzi Feay, review of You Should Have Known.
Independent (London, England), March 21, 2014, Lucy Scholes, review of You Should Have Known.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1996, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 164; February 1, 1999, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 169; October 15, 2003, review of Interference Powder, p. 1273; September 15, 2004, review of The White Rose, p. 884; January 15, 2009, review of Admission; June 1, 2013, review of You Should Have Known; December 1, 2016, review of The Devil and Webster; March 1, 2021, review of The Plot; February 15, 2022, review of The Latecomer; August 1, 2024, review of The Sequel.
Library Journal, February 15, 1996, Maria A. Perez-Stable, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 176; March 1, 1999, Caroline Mann, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 109; November 1, 2004, Keddy Ann Outlaw, review of The White Rose, p. 75; February 1, 2009, Keddy Ann Outlaw, review of Admission, p. 66; February 1, 2014, Robin Nesbit, review of You Should Have Known, p. 66; July, 2024, David Keymer, review of The Sequel, p. 77.
Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2009, Wendy Smith, review of Admission; March 13, 2014, Wendy Smith, review of You Should Have Known.
New York, March 22, 2013, Karen Croner, “How the Admission Novelist Came to Terms with Her Book’s Very Different Film Version.”
New York Daily News, March 9, 2014, Sherryl Connelly, review of You Should Have Known.
New Yorker, June 8, 2009, review of Admission, p. 113.
New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1996, Marilyn Stasio, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 29; April 25, 1999, James Polk, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 31; November 17, 2009, Rebecca Reddicliffe, review of Admission; March 26, 2014, Janet Maslin, review of You Should Have Known, p. C4; April 11, 2014, Susan Dominus, review of You Should Have Known; May 16, 2021, Elisabeth Egan, review of The Plot, p. 15; June 5, 2022, Allegra Goodman, “Sibling Revelry,” review of The Latecomer, p. 18.
Observer (London, England), May 16, 1999, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 12.
Publishers Weekly, February 5, 1996, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 76; February 8, 1999, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 193; October 27, 2003, review of Interference Powder, p. 69; November 15, 2004, review of The White Rose, p. 39; December 22, 2008, review of Admission, p. 27; August 26, 2013, review of You Should Have Known, p. 44; October 14, 2013, Alex Sanidad, “PW Talks with Jean Hanff Korelitz: Denying the Obvious,” p. 32; January 23, 2017, review of The Devil and Webster, p. 54; March 14, 2022, Michele Filgate, “Family Matters: Jean Hanff Korelitz Focuses on an Unhappy Family in Her New Novel, The Latecomer,” author interview, 36.
School Library Journal, September, 1999, Pam Spencer, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 244; December, 2003, Barbara Auerbach, review of Interference Powder, p. 153.
TLS: Times Literary Supplement, August 4, 1989, Tim Dooley, review of The Properties of Breath, p. 850; August 16, 1996, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 24; May 14, 1999, review of The Sabbathday River, p. 23; September 15, 2017, Alice Hiller, review of The Devil and Webster, p. 31.
USA Today, April 16, 2009, Bob Minzesheimer, review of Admission, p. 7; March 18, 2014, Bob Minzesheimer, review of You Should Have Known.
UWIRE Text, April 20, 2021, Lilly Pearce, “Author of The Undoing Fails to Live Up to Expectations in Her New Novel The Plot,” review of The Plot, p. 1.
Virginia Quarterly Review, fall, 1996, review of A Jury of Her Peers, p. 129.
Wall Street Journal, April 23, 1999, Gabriella Stern, review of The Sabbathday River, p. W7.
Washington Post, October 1, 2024, Maureen Corrigan, “The Sequel Is the Perfect Suspense Tale for Patricia Highsmith Fans,” review of The Sequel.
Washington Post Book World, April 13, 2014, Maureen Corrigan, review of You Should Have Known.
ONLINE
Admission Movie Web site, http://www.focusfeatures.com/admission/ (July 15, 2014), author profile.
Bermudaonion’s Weblog, http://bermudaonion.wordpress.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Blue Flower Arts Web site, http://www.blueflowerarts.com/ (July 15, 2014), author profile.
Booking Mama, http://bookingmama.blogspot.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Bookopolis, http://bookopolis.blogspot.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (November 17, 2009), Barbara J. King, review of Admission.
Books, Movies & Chinese Food, http://books-movies-chinesefood.blogspot.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Book Studio, http://www.thebookstudio.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Book the Writer, http://bookthewriter.com/ (July 15, 2014), author profile.
Celadon Books website, https://celadonbooks.com/ (November 7, 2024), author interview.
Drey’s Library, http://dreyslibrary.blogspot.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Elle Online, https://www.elle.com/ (October 15, 2024), Riza Cruz, author interview.
I’m Booking It, http://imbookingit.wordpress.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Jean Hanff Korelitz website, https://www.jeanhanffkorelitz.com (November 7, 2024).
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (July 23, 2021), Lisa Allardice, author interview.
Mostly Fiction, http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/ (November 17, 2009), Eleanor Bukowsky, review of Admission.
My Cozy Book Nook, http://mycozybooknook.blogspot.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Priscilla Gilman, http://priscillagilman.com/ (April 22, 2014), Priscilla Gilman, “A Q&A with Novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz.”
Reading Is My Superpower, http://superfastreader.com/ (November 17, 2009), review of Admission.
Redbook, http://www.redbookmag.com/ (July 15, 2014), Hannah Hickok, “Q&A with Jean Hanff Korelitz.”
S. Krishna’s Books, http://www.skrishnasbooks.com/ (November 17, 2009), Swapna Krishna, review of Admission.*
Short Bio
Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of nine novels, including THE SEQUEL (coming October ‘24), THE LATECOMER and THE PLOT (both in development for limited series), YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN (adapted as HBO’s 2020 limited series, THE UNDOING, by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant) and ADMISSION (basis for the 2013 film starring Tina Fey). THE PLOT was featured on The Tonight Show as the Fallon Summer Reads 2021 pick. Korelitz lives in New York City.
LONGER BIO
Jean Hanff Korelitz was born in New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College and Cambridge University. She is the author of nine novels, including THE SEQUEL (coming October ‘24), THE LATECOMER and THE PLOT (both in development as limited series), YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN (adapted by David E. Kelley as HBO’s 2020 limited series, THE UNDOING, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant), the New York Times bestselling ADMISSION (adapted as the 2013 film starring Tina Fey), THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER, THE WHITE ROSE, THE SABBATHDAY RIVER, and A JURY OF HER PEERS. In addition, Korelitz is the author of a collection of poems, THE PROPERTIES OF BREATH, and a middle grade reader, INTERFERENCE POWDER. With her husband, Irish poet Paul Muldoon, she adapted James Joyce’s THE DEAD as an immersive theater piece which was staged by New York City’s Irish Repertory Theatre for three seven-week runs in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and will return in the fall of 2024. She is the creator of BOOKTHEWRITER, which runs “Pop-Up Book Groups”, small gatherings with authors to discuss great books. THE PLOT was featured on The Tonight Show as the Fallon Summer Reads 2021 pick. Korelitz lives in New York City and has two grown up children.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
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Jean Hanff Korelitz was born in New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is author of a book of poems, The Properties of Breath, and a frequent book reviewer. Her novels, A Jury Of Her Peers and The Sabbathday River. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey with her husband, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, and their daughter.
Genres: Literary Fiction, Mystery
New and upcoming books
October 2024
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The Sequel
(Book , book 2)
Series
Book
1. The Plot (2021)
2. The Sequel (2024)
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Novels
A Jury of Her Peers (1996)
The Sabbathday River (1998)
Interference Powder (2003)
The White Rose (2005)
Admission (2009)
The Undoing (2012)
aka You Should Have Known
The Devil and Webster (2017)
The Latecomer (2022)
Collections
The Properties of Breath (poems) (1988)
Jean Hanff Korelitz
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Born May 16, 1961 (age 63)
Occupation Author
Alma mater Dartmouth College; Clare College, Cambridge
Notable works Admission, The White Rose, You Should Have Known, The Plot, The Latecomer
Spouse Paul Muldoon (m. 1987)
Children 2
Website
www.jeanhanffkorelitz.com
Jean Hanff Korelitz (born May 16, 1961) is an American novelist, playwright, theater producer and essayist.[1]
Biography
Korelitz was born to Jewish parents and raised in New York City. After graduating from Dartmouth College with a degree in English, she continued her studies at Clare College, Cambridge,[2] where she was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal.[1] She has published nine novels since 1996, the most recent being The Sequel, published in October 2024. She has also written articles and essays for many publications, including Real Simple and the "Modern Love" column in The New York Times.
In 2013 Korelitz created BOOKTHEWRITER, a New York City based service that presents "Pop-Up Book Groups" with prominent authors in private homes. Approximately 20 events are held each year and groups are limited to 20. Past authors have included Joyce Carol Oates, Erica Jong, David Duchovny, Jeanine Cummins, Christina Baker Kline, Jane Green, Adriana Trigiani, Meghan Daum, Dani Shapiro, Darin Strauss, Elizabeth Strout and many others.[3]
In 2015 Korelitz and her sister, Nina Korelitz Matza, created Dot Dot Productions, LLC, in order to produce The Dead, 1904, an immersive theater adaptation of James Joyce's short story "The Dead", with The Irish Repertory Theatre. The story was adapted by Korelitz and Paul Muldoon.[4]
Personal life
While living in England, Korelitz met Irish poet Paul Muldoon. The couple married on August 30, 1987,[1] and went on to have two children: Dorothy (born 1992) and Asher (born 1999). From 1990 until 2013 on they lived in Princeton, New Jersey, where Muldoon has long taught Creative Writing. They now reside in Korelitz's native New York City.[5] During a talk for House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining program, Korelitz said she “became an atheist at the age of eight."[6]
Novels
A Jury of Her Peers and The Sabbathday River
Korelitz's first novel, A Jury of Her Peers, was a legal thriller about a Legal Aid lawyer who uncovers a jury tampering plot, which Kirkus called "a monstrous-conspiracy wolf in legal-intrigue clothing."[7] Her second novel, The Sabbathday River, transplanted elements of the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to a small community near Hanover, New Hampshire, and described a case of infanticide and a resulting trial.[8]
The White Rose
Korelitz's third novel, The White Rose, transposed the plot and characters of the Richard Strauss opera Der Rosenkavalier to 1990s New York City. In The New York Times Book Review, reviewer Elizabeth Judd described The White Rose as "incisive and urbane ... (hearkening) back to the gender confusions of Shakespeare's comedies" and called the novel "a significant step forward" following Korelitz's earlier legal thrillers. Anthony Giardina, reviewing the novel in the San Francisco Chronicle, complained that the character of Oliver was occasionally unconvincing but called the academic details of Sophie's and Marian's lives "spot-on". The Boston Globe's reviewer, Barbara Fisher, wrote: "Within the comic plot of this lighthearted novel lies a weightier theme. Having played around with disguises, cross-dressing, and self-delusion, the characters happily gain the prize of self-knowledge."[9]
Admission
Admission, published in April 2009, was reviewed in the Education supplement of The New York Times by a high school senior who compared the college application process to the heroine's mid-life crisis.[10] Entertainment Weekly gave the novel an A− rating and called it "that rare thing in a novel: both juicy and literary, a genuinely smart read with a human, beating heart."[11] In its review, Huffington Post reviewer Malcolm Ritter singled out the "atmosphere and details" of the admissions office setting. "That's fascinating for us who've gotten good or bad news from colleges for which we yearned, or shepherded ambitious children through the gauntlet of the application process."[12] The Wall Street Journal criticized the novel for its "wooden monologues" and "improbable love story".[13]
Admission was adapted by screenwriter Karen Croner for the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey.
You Should Have Known
Grand Central Publishing published Korelitz's fifth novel, You Should Have Known, in March 2014. The book tells the story of a New York therapist who discovers that her beloved husband has a secret and unfathomable life and may have been responsible for a murder. The book was published in eighteen languages. An HBO adaptation of the book, titled The Undoing, aired in 2020 starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, Donald Sutherland, Matilda De Angelis, Lily Rabe, Edgar Ramirez, Noah Jupe and Noma Dumezweni and directed by Susanne Bier.
The Devil and Webster
Grand Central Publishing published Korelitz's sixth novel, The Devil and Webster, in March 2017. Formerly a VISTA volunteer in Goddard, NH, Naomi Roth is now a feminist scholar and the first female president of Webster College in Central Massachusetts. Webster College, which shares some characteristics with Wesleyan University and others with Dartmouth College, is a liberal arts college known for left-leaning and activist undergraduates. In a plot that mirrors the student unrest of recent years, the Webster community erupts in student protests over the denial of tenure to an African-American professor of anthropology. Roth, whose daughter Hannah is a Webster sophomore, discovers that her own activist past has not prepared her to handle the protest, which quickly spirals out of control. On NPR's Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan described it as "a smart, semi-satire about the reign of identity politics on college campuses today."[14]
The Plot
Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan, published Korelitz's seventh novel, The Plot, in spring 2021. The novel concerns a failed writer, Jacob Finch Bonner, who appropriates the plot of his late student's unwritten novel. The resulting book becomes a publishing phenomenon, but its author begins to receive messages from someone who claims to know what he did.[15] In late 2021, it was announced actor Mahershala Ali was signed on to star in a limited series adaptation of The Plot.[16]
The Latecomer
Korelitz's eighth novel, The Latecomer, was published by Celadon Books on May 31, 2022. Described as a slow-building literary novel, The Latecomer revolves around the wealthy New York-based Oppenheimer family, where the Oppenheimer triplets' lives are upended by the arrival of a fourth, unexpected sibling. In February 2022, it was reported that the novel would be adapting into a television series from Bruna Papandrea's Made Up Stories and Kristen Campo.[17]
The Sequel
Korelitz's ninth novel, The Sequel, was published by Celadon Books on October 1, 2024. It is the sequel to The Plot.[18]
Bibliography
Novels
A Jury of Her Peers (1996)
The Sabbathday River (1999)
The White Rose (2006)
Admission (2009)
You Should Have Known (2014)
The Devil and Webster (2017)
The Plot (2021)
The Latecomer (2022)
The Sequel (2024)
Other books
Interference Powder (2003), a middle grade reader
The Properties of Breath (1989), a collection of poetry
The Dead, 1904 (with Paul Muldoon) (2016), an immersive theater adaptation of James Joyce's "The Dead"
Theater work
In 2015 Korelitz and her sister, Nina Korelitz Matza, created Dot Dot Productions LLC to produce The Dead, 1904. The Dead, 1904 was produced for The Irish Repertory Theatre in The American Irish Historical Society from November 2016 through January 2017, starring Kate Burton as Gretta Conroy and Boyd Gaines as Gabriel Conroy[19] and received generally favorable reviews. A second production, from November 2017 through January 2018 starred Melissa Gilbert as Gretta Conroy and Rufus Collins as Gabriel Conroy.[20][21] A third production from November 2018 through January 2019 featured most of the remaining cast, including Melissa Gilbert as Gretta Conroy and Rufus Collins as Gabriel Conroy, with the addition of American tenor Robert Mack as Bartell D'Arcy. Gallery Press published The Dead, 1904 in November, 2018.[22]
Film and television adaptations
Korelitz's book Admission is the basis for the 2013 film of the same name. The film was adapted from the novel by Karen Croner and directed by Paul Weitz. It stars Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, as well as Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn, Nat Wolff, and Gloria Reuben. The first trailer was released on November 15, 2012, and the film was released in the US on March 22, 2013.[23][24][needs update] David E. Kelley's adaptation of You Should Have Known, renamed The Undoing, was filmed for HBO with director Susanne Bier and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, Donald Sutherland and Noah Jupe. Originally scheduled for May 2020 it was rescheduled for October 2020.
QUOTED: "That people aren’t always who they appear to be. That houses can be like people in more ways than one. That Henry Darger isn’t the only Outsider Artist. That religion and politics sometimes serve the purpose of more intimate human needs. That sometimes we only learn to know a person after they’ve left us. That great art can heal our souls. That even families twisted by resentments and grievances can be brought back together by forgiveness and love."
An Interview with Jean Hanff Korelitz on Her New Book The Latecomer
Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of The Latecomer
Celadon Books sat down with author Jean Hanff Korelitz to discuss her latest book The Latecomer, an immersive, deeply perceptive story of three completely different triplets, and the upending of their family with the late arrival of a fourth.
How did you come up with the idea for The Latecomer?
I’d heard about families with children conceived by in vitro fertilization who have additional children years later from leftover embryos, and I found this really fascinating. I was especially interested in the impact on the later child of learning that their family has essentially begun without them. In one sense, it’s no different from what any younger sibling eventually realizes, but here the children have all been “made” at the same time, and there is a random or human factor in who gets born and who does not. I thought: What would that feel like, to realize what you’ve missed? And what if the later child somehow answers the brokenness in the older siblings and in the family as a whole? So, I made up a family to explore some of these issues and watch those ideas play out.
How is The Latecomer different from or similar to your previous seven novels?
I’ve written on both sides of the literary/thriller line, wherever that may be — if someone locates it, would they please enlighten me? — and The Latecomer definitely belongs on the literary side. This is not to say that there aren’t twists: Life is too short not to have plot twists in every novel one reads! But the story of this family does not center around a crime — at least not a crime in the conventional sense!
The sibling dynamics in this novel are so nuanced and complex. What was your process in creating these very different siblings?
It was like setting off on four different journeys at once, and those journeys didn’t even begin in the same place or at the same time! I was fascinated by the ways in which these brothers and sisters tried so hard to escape one another, and how they were fated to return, but only by the intervention of their lost sibling. Or, I suppose you could argue, siblings, plural. Keeping track of who knows what and when they know it was quite complicated, but worth it in the end.
Do you relate to any one of the triplets, or other characters, in particular?
All of them, even Harrison! I share Sally’s tendency to hide, Lewyn’s feelings of inadequacy, and Harrison’s disdain for people who don’t share his political opinions! (I know I’m supposed to be more open-minded, but I didn’t get through the last four years unscathed.) I also share Phoebe’s impatience with people who can’t get along and Ephraim’s wish to get to the bottom of things. I share Johanna’s difficulty in reconciling an idea of family life with its reality and Salo’s yearning for absolution. It’s not difficult to find something in most people to connect to. (Eli, though? He’s on his own.)
The family moves around a lot in the book — from Brooklyn to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts to Ithaca, New York, and elsewhere. How does the setting of The Latecomer contribute to the story?
In one earlier draft, the Oppenheimer family set off on a round-the-world cruise, and in another they traveled to Germany to investigate the life of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (aka Judd Suss), so the final version of the novel feels pretty sedentary by comparison! The novel opens with a dispersal as the triplets leave home and ends with a gathering. I have always loved the G. K. Chesterton quote about wandering to the ends of the earth, only to be brought back by a twitch upon the thread, which was so powerfully used by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. I definitely had that in mind as I watched these siblings wander and return.
A couple of your previous novels have made their way on-screen. If you could cast the Oppenheimer triplets yourself, who would play them?
I’m not great at this kind of thing, but Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant should obviously play the parents!
What do you hope your readers will take away from the book?
That people aren’t always who they appear to be. That houses can be like people in more ways than one. That Henry Darger isn’t the only Outsider Artist. That religion and politics sometimes serve the purpose of more intimate human needs. That sometimes we only learn to know a person after they’ve left us. That great art can heal our souls. That even families twisted by resentments and grievances can be brought back together by forgiveness and love.
Shelf Life: Jean Hanff Korelitz
The author of You Should Have Known and The Sequel takes our literary survey.
By Riza CruzPublished: Oct 15, 2024
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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz
The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz
$15 at Amazon
She may have written the book (You Should Have Known) on which David E. Kelley’s The Undoing (HBO) was based, but even Jean Hanff Korelitz wasn’t sure how the ending would unfold in the limited series nominated for four Golden Globes. Now her latest and ninth novel, The Sequel (Celadon) is out, a, well, sequel to 2021’s The Plot, which is also being adapted for the small screen with Mahershala Ali. Korelitz, whose The Latecomer is also being adapted for TV, will executive produce both series. Her book Admission became a 2013 movie with Tina Fey. She’s also written a poetry collection and a children’s book.
The NY-born, -raised, and -based NYT-bestselling author (she lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for years while she and her Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet and former New Yorker poetry editor husband, Paul Muldoon, taught at the Ivy) is no stranger to adapting works for other media. The couple adapted James Joyce’s The Dead, 1904, an immersive play at Irish Repertory Theatre in the past and opening this year, on November 20.
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What started out as an auction item for her kids’ school fundraiser has become BOOKTHEWRITER, which holds pop-up book groups in private apartments, including the apartment that served as the home in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” pilot (unofficial motto: “Come for the literature, stay for the real estate!”), featuring Shelf Lifers Jennifer Egan, Sarah Ruhl, Cathleen Schine, Elizabeth Strout, Michael Cunningham, Griffin Dunne, Julia Phillips, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, among others. She was an extra on “The Undoing”; lead actor Hugh Grant’s first movie, “Privileged” (her son makes a cameo on “Admission”); lives in upstate New York part time, where she interviewed Erica Jong for the Sharon Springs Poetry Festival; took Zoom ballet classes during the pandemic and reads books on epidemiology; once fell asleep during a Bob Dylan concert; was told by her 5th-grade teacher was a good writer; and has dogs named Sherlock and Olive
What to Read Next
Interests: The UK (the Anglophile, who first visited London when she was 6, attended Cambridge after graduating from Dartmouth); psychopaths (her mother was a therapist), hoarders, and liars; mudlarking; Mormonism.
Fan of: Audiobooks, which she downloads from the NYPL site, Beekman Farm, musical theater.
Good at: Being up on Jewish-American history, making marzipan Santas (a family tradition), decorating with antique store and flea market finds (she collects ironstone, pink lustreware, and way too many other things), old houses.
Bad at: Discipline.
On bucket list: Having an antique store (an antique/vintage corner at Rural Provisions in Sharon Springs, NY has to do for now). Browse her list of book recs below.
The book that:
...I consider literary comfort food:
Elinor Lipman’s The Inn At Lake Devine is a novel I often give to people who are sick, perhaps because it features an indelible bout of accidental poisoning by mushrooms.
...shaped my worldview:
Ingri D’Aulaire’s D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, which I read at age 8 and which made me, instantly and irrevocably, an atheist. It remains the single most influential book in a lifetime of reading. Beautifully written, comprehensive in scope, gorgeously illustrated. It should be in every library. (It also made an entire college course on Greek Mythology utterly redundant.)
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...made me rethink a long-held belief:
Jo Baker’s Longbourn. I had always been of the opinion that an author’s characters belong to them and them alone, but this reimagining of Pride and Prejudice was revelatory and powerful. I’ve since opened my eyes to other novels that lean on existing works of literature: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly. Eventually, I wrote an entire novel (The Plot) about the imprecise borders between fictions.
...I read in one sitting, it was that good:
Anything by Thomas Perry. I won’t start one of his books if I can’t finish it. Gateway drug: Vanishing Act.
…made me laugh out loud:
All but forgotten today, but still the funniest novel I’ve ever read: Gail Parent’s Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York. It begins with a street vendor who lies about the calories in his chocolate “health shakes.” HOW COULD HE DO THAT?
...has the best title:
You Are Now Entering the Human Heart by Janet Frame.
...has the greatest ending:
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. (I had to have it explained to me, but once that happened my head exploded. Not literally.)
…features a character I love to hate:
Martin Amis’ early novels are full of grotesques. No one who reads his novel Dead Babies will ever name a child Keith.
…describes a place I’d want to live:
I’m a confirmed New Yorker but Cathleen Schine’s novel The Love Letter made me want to move instantly to this fictional Connecticut town.
...features the coolest book jacket:
The cover of Rats by Robert Sullivan is justly famous. Sullivan stood in an alley in Lower Manhattan for an entire year to write about the rat colony there, and used it to tell an entirely different story about the history of New York. Last year I moved to that neighborhood, and I pass the alley every day.
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:
The White Rose by…me. It absolutely made me blush when I was writing it.
…I would have blurbed if asked:
I am a confirmed non-blurber. I have broken my rule only once, for the same close friend who explained the end of A Suitable Boy to me. Otherwise, I am of the opinion that blurbing has evolved into a form where it means little. Having said that, I would have blurbed Pride and Prejudice. I would have blurbed the hell out of it.
Interview
Jean Hanff Korelitz: ‘I wanted to be a literary novelist. But I realised that I liked plot’
This article is more than 3 years old
Lisa Allardice
The author of the book behind TV smash The Undoing talks about her new novel The Plot, a thriller about plagiarism – and how she fell for Hugh Grant
Lisa Allardice
Fri 23 Jul 2021 07.00 EDT
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In January 2020, the American novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz was “all in all, not in a great place”, despite the runaway success of the HBO series The Undoing, based on her novel You Should Have Known. She was extremely anxious about a new virus in China that she was reading about (she reads a lot of books on epidemiology). “I was pretty much the only person I knew at that point who was really freaking out,” she says cheerfully from her bedroom in upstate New York, her dog Sherlock snoozing serenely beside her. “And I was really freaking out. It felt like we were in the opening chapters of Stephen King’s The Stand.” She was also furious about the first impeachment of President Trump, the outcome of which seemed all too clear. “I think if I had been scared without being angry, or I had been angry without being scared, it wouldn’t have been so combustible, but I was both.”
More personally, she was exhausted by wrestling with the second draft of a novel that was refusing to come together. She was so nervous about a meeting with her editor, who had already turned the book down once, that she forced her husband, the Pulitzer prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, to come with her. He waited in a nearby coffee shop while she went off to her publishers in a state of “total meltdown”. Her editor still didn’t think the book was ready, but suddenly an idea “just popped” into Korelitz’s head, and she began outlining a story that she barely knew herself. “I’d gone into that meeting unable to sell one novel and apparently I had left with a two-book deal, which I’ve never had before.”
Events then “conspired in a horrible way to create this set of unique circumstances in which not only did I not have anything else to do, but I did not want to be engaged in the world”. She stopped watching the news or reading the papers. As the pandemic struck she wrote each day, starting in bed and continuing until five or six, when her husband would bring her a drink. “I made no sourdough bread. I baked no banana bread. I didn’t take up macramé.” Apart from Zoom ballet classes three times a week, she did nothing else for four months. “When you are in the grip of something, it’s harder not to do it than to do it,” she says. “It’s never happened before and I don’t expect it to happen again.”
The result is The Plot, which comes emblazoned with superlatives from King. Our novelist-protagonist Jacob Finch Bonner (he pinched the Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird) was once a New York Times New & Noteworthy author, but is now confined “to the special purgatory for formerly promising writers, from which so few ever emerged”. When we meet him he is teaching a third-rate creative writing course at Ripley University. One of his students, a first-class “asshole” called Evan Parker, claims to have a storyline that cannot fail, and when he hears it Jake can’t help but agree. A few years later, even further down on his uppers, he discovers that Parker has died. “Was Jake really supposed to throw a plot like that into some other writer’s grave?” As the epigraph, taken from TS Eliot, has it: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Jake’s novel Crib (geddit) duly becomes a sensation, but it’s not long before he receives an email from someone calling themselves “TalentedTom” – one of many nods to Patricia Highsmith – saying simply: “You are a thief.”
The Plot raises questions about appropriation and who has the right to tell someone else’s story, an increasingly fraught issue in publishing. “To plagiarise language is to be boiled in oil as far as I’m concerned,” Korelitz says. “But there’s a murkier thing when it comes to the story. It is really hard to figure out where the lines are. Imagination is such a mushy business.”
For every David Sedaris or Gillian Flynn there’s a million people like me, some of whom have been publishing for years
With her long, silvery hair, the 60-year-old author of seven novels resembles Susan Sontag in her prime. Raised in “an extremely progressive environment” by Jewish parents (both of whom are still alive; they celebrated her father’s 95th birthday last week), Korelitz describes herself as “a lifelong atheist, but deeply tortured by ethical guilt and moral compulsion”. Much of her fiction turns on murky moral dilemmas such as that faced by Jake. “That’s what I zero in on all the time,” she says. “They make great plots. When we know we are supposed to do one thing, but we do something else instead, unless you are a Ripley, that’s a problem for most of us.”
The Plot gives a new dimension to the term literary thriller. As well as being elegantly written (Korelitz started out as a poet), this is a novel in which namechecks of writers, from James Patterson to Jonathan Franzen, far outnumber bloodied corpses, and in which an unfamiliarity with Marilynne Robinson can prove fatal. Not to mention references to King himself, who has not only written about plagiarism but been accused of it. Korelitz’s friend Joyce Carol Oates was accused by the same person, who claimed authors photographed their desk from a zeppelin, she recalls. “It’s absurd, but this was a filed case.” The novel is also very funny. Korelitz is merciless on creative writing programmes; she is not an MFA graduate, although she did spend a couple of years “reading books and writing poetry” at Cambridge University in the early 80s, so “I’m not pure”. Book nerds will love it, as will fans of Gillian Flynn and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
“Oh pur-lease! From your mouth to God’s ears,” she exclaims. Whenever she worried she was overdoing Jake’s stratospheric success (Oprah, Spielberg, the whole shebang), she would think:“I’m just throwing my fantasies at this”, and then: “Gone Girl! Gone Girl did all of this.” Korelitz may now have a whole new readership who, as she says, had never heard of her until Nicole Kidman walked on to their screens wearing those coats in The Undoing, but, as she reminds me, The Plot is her seventh book. “Novels number one through six have been: ‘This is great, this is great, this is great, nobody is buying it, the end.’”
“We are all Jake!” she says of his all-too-recognisable wilderness years. She recalls a book tour when she flew to Seattle to find only three people at the event. “It is deeply humiliating, but it is normal. For every David Sedaris or Gillian Flynn there’s a million people like me, some of whom have been publishing for years.”
Her first two novels were “rejected everywhere”. She was pregnant and remembers telling her then agent that she had failed because she was never going to have time to write a novel now. “She said, ‘Maybe, but I have clients who suddenly got very organised when they had children.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, that won’t be me.’ But it was me. I got very organised. Every time I had a babysitter so I could write, I wrote. I didn’t sit around.” She also made what she calls the “cynical” decision to write the sort of book that would get published. She had “a teeny idea” for a legal thriller, which became her 1996 book A Jury of Her Peers, “and boom, people wanted to publish it”. But she was torn: “I wanted to be a literary novelist. But I had realised that I liked plot.”
Devastating charm ... Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman in The Undoing.
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Devastating charm ... Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman in The Undoing. Photograph: AP
Although The Undoing turned her novel into a thriller, she finds it odd being labelled a mystery writer. “I never read them. I don’t care who did it. I care about why.” Along with making the perfect New York couple, the Sachs, wealthier, the TV show adds much more to the original than expensive coats, and Korelitz feels uneasy being credited with storylines she didn’t write. But she had no qualms about trusting writer David E Kelley with her novel (he also adapted Liane Moriarty’s novel Big Little Lies for TV). “It’s like giving your thing to Picasso and saying, ‘Do whatever you want with it.’” She’d already been through the process when her fourth novel, Admission, about the ordeal of trying to get into elite American universities, was made into a film starring Tina Fey in 2013. “I feel like it is part of that great flow of ideas, of stories,” she says. “I’ve loved too many adaptations that were different from the books or the source material to be snooty and obnoxious about it when it happens to me.”
Like the couple in You Should Have Known, Korelitz’s mother was a therapist and her father was a doctor. She credits her “love of psychopaths” to her mum, with whom she would “dissect” clients’ stories over the dinner table: “She had a vested interest in indoctrinating my sister and me with this information because she wanted us not to fall prey to the devastating charm of these people.” Although she stresses that the apparently saintly paediatric oncologist in her novel (played so convincingly by Hugh Grant) is in no way based on her father, she wanted to harness something of the “doctor as God” culture that prevailed in 1950s medicine when he trained. “If you were a psychopath and you were a doctor, you wouldn’t want to be a dermatologist or an orthopaedic surgeon, you would go straight to the white-hot core of human emotion, and that is terminally ill children.”
Although born and bred in New York, Korelitz is “a major anglophile”, and took the first opportunity to study at Cambridge. She met Muldoon on an Arvon poetry course, on which he was teaching, at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire, the former home of Ted Hughes. It was “almost ridiculously meaningful”, given the importance to her of Sylvia Plath – the subject of her unpublished first novel – whose grave is in nearby Heptonstall. “Lest that sound too romantic,” she recalls first meeting Muldoon at the Poetry Society in London the previous autumn, of which he has “zero memory”. (She tells a good story of a similar first encounter with Grant around this time: a friend asked if she wanted to be in a movie. “I said, ‘Sure’ and put on my nicest dress”, and so she found herself as an extra in his first film Privileged. “He was so magnetic you couldn’t take your eyes off him.”)
Unlike in many writer-couples, Muldoon isn’t her first reader. “Paul doesn’t naturally gravitate towards fiction,” she says diplomatically. “I think by now he has read everything I’ve written, but I’m not sure.” She laughs. “We both love language. It expresses in different ways. But we recognise one another as fellow addicts of this wonderful thing.”
She has now finally delivered the appropriately named The Latecomer, that difficult novel from which she took a break to write The Plot, and is again anxiously awaiting the response from her editor. It’s the story of “a very odd family” with triplets, who have a baby using a leftover embryo 20 years later. No murders here, “only crimes of the heart”.
Last autumn, before that fateful meeting with her publisher, all she “wanted in the world was a vaccine and a new president”, she says. “I wasn’t even asking for a bestselling book.” She may well get that too.
QUOTED: "Korelitz's pacy, witty prose juggles Naomi's many torments and tormentors, including an enraged Board of Trustees. But for all its suspenseful build-up of external pressures, the novel lives most strongly in Naomi's battle with herself."
Jean Hanff Korelitz
THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER
368pp. Faber. Paperback, 12.99 [pounds sterling].
978 0 571 32798 0
Written before Hillary Clinton's defeat and set in an elite East Coast university, not unlike Dartmouth, Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Devil and Webster explores America's liberal values as embodied by the protagonist Naomi Roth. The first female (and feminist) President of the fictitious Webster College, Naomi previously featured in Hanff Korelitz's The Sabbathday River (1999), where she organized a women's quilting collective in a remote New England town during the 1980s.
In the intervening years, she has risen through academia without ever fully shedding her activist allegiances. These credentials have helped her sell Webster on its progressiveness and diversity to its largely wealthy Liberal Arts students; but they are of no use when the university's historic green--the Stump--is soon occupied by students protesting a perceived (if unevidenced) act of institutional racism.
Naomi initially views the protest with "nostalgic, vaguely maternal kind of approval" without bothering to discover its cause. She has been cocooned almost to somnolence by presiding over an institution so privileged and politically correct that serving "pad thai" might be protested against as "culturally insensitive" because it's inauthentic. She has also been knocked off kilter by her only daughter Hannah leaving home to join Webster--and then the muddy, unwashed, encamped protest.
Even when informed of the reasons for the students' anger by Hannah, Naomi does not comprehend the extent to which the threatened dismissal of an African American professor affects her students. Nor does she foresee how social media will leak the story to the national news almost overnight, and consequently engender radicalized external protesters--a scenario which could seem not unconnected to the Democrats' separation from some of their voters.
Naomi rapidly finds herself on a wrecked campus, barricaded by CNN and other media, while legally unable to comment. Hanff Korelitz's pacy, witty prose juggles Naomi's many torments and tormentors, including an enraged Board of Trustees. But for all its suspenseful build-up of external pressures, the novel lives most strongly in Naomi's battle with herself. She comes to realize that she can no longer "speak truth to power" as she once did--but must accept its responsibilities.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hiller, Alice. "THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5972, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 31. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634746089/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03c3bc93. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Korelitz's smooth prose and unfailing intelligence make this novel worth reading."
Korelitz, Jean Hanff THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER Grand Central Publishing (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 21 ISBN: 978-1-4555-9238-8
The president of an elite New England college grapples with student protest in Korelitz's sixth novel (You Should Have Known, 2014, etc.).Naomi Roth is Webster College's first female president, a fitting denouement to the school's half-century evolution from a bastion of WASP privilege to a progressive institution housing a diverse faculty and student body. Naomi, herself from an earlier generation of demonstrators, is inclined to be tolerant when a group of students camps on the Webster quad to protest the denial of tenure to popular professor Nicholas Gall. Although the students insinuate it's because Gall is black, in fact his only published work was found to be plagiarized--but if Naomi says that, Gall could sue the college. She hopes the protestors, who include her daughter, Hannah, will soon fade away, but she hasn't reckoned on the charisma of Omar Khayal, a student of Palestinian origins, whose soft-spoken demeanor belies his ability to inflame the situation at every turn. Korelitz has always been a deft plotter, so presumably it's intentional that readers will figure out Omar is not what he seems long before Naomi does. She is the latest in the author's long line of smart but blinkered female protagonists, but this time the origins of Naomi's obtuseness remain murky, and her relationships with secondary characters like best friend Francine Rigor, Webster dean of admissions, are less fully fleshed than usual. In addition, the academic concerns that made such a vivid backdrop for the human drama of Admission (2009) here seem excessively self-referential, as does the endless wrangling about just how inclusive Webster really is. Granted, this is currently a hot topic on real-life campuses, but it needs a more compelling fictional framework. Nonetheless, Korelitz's smooth prose and unfailing intelligence make this novel worth reading, if not quite up to her usual high standards. A bit of a disappointment from a talented author.
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"Korelitz, Jean Hanff: THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A471902070/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=53e1f3e0. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "The Devil And Webster is wittily on target about, among other things, social class and privilege, silencing, old school feminist ambivalence about power and Korelitz's home subject, the insanity of the college admissions process."
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BYLINE: MAUREEN CORRIGAN
HOST: DAVE DAVIES
DAVE DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. In her 2009 novel, "Admission," which was made into a movie starring Tina Fey, Jean Hanff Korelitz took readers on an insider's tour of the college admissions process at Princeton. Her new novel, "The Devil And Webster," surveys student life at a New England college in turmoil. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: A few days ago, one of my students asked me what I was reading, so I told her about Jean Hanff Korelitz's new novel called "The Devil And Webster." My student's eyes got wider as I finished lightly summarizing the plot. And she said, with some concern about Korelitz, I hope she's ready for all the angry tweets and emails. Yeah, I think she probably is.
Korelitz's his new novel is a smart, semi-satire about, the reign of identity politics on college campuses today. That in itself is a tricky subject for a white novelist to tackle, unless she or he is a far-right conservative, which Korelitz is not. But then Korelitz makes matters even more complicated. Her heroine is a Jewish, feminist college president named Naomi Roth. Facing off against her are an African-American professor and a Palestinian undergraduate. These two men turn out to be the most duplicitous characters in the story. You see why my student's eyes widened at what sounds like a deliberately provocative set-up.
Recently, the novelist Lionel Shriver stirred up a lot of criticism on the left by publicly denouncing what she called tippy-toe fiction constrained by identity politics. Korelitz is not tippy-toeing here. Rather, she's asserting the novelist's right to imagine a story that's messier than a homily and characters who are more nuanced than mere emblems.
Korelitz's setting is the fictional Webster College. Webster is an elite, liberal arts college in the mode of Amherst or Wiliams. It used to be a bastion of old boys and old money, but it remade itself in the 1970s. Now Webster boasts a much more diverse student body, along with a dining hall that serves culturally sensitive cuisine of all nations and a college portfolio divested of all trace elements of nuclear energy and diamond dust. And Webster has its first female president in Naomi Roth. Naomi is our moral center. And she couldn't be more likable, a single mother, astute and beleaguered, wild haired and a tad frumpy. She still harbors a lingering case of imposter syndrome under her proper Eileen Fisher outfits.
When the story begins, Naomi has become aware of a growing band of students, her own daughter among them, camped out around the stump, the epicenter of campus and the traditional gathering place for protests. But this group of protesters is maddeningly closed mouthed, refusing to meet with the administration to discuss their grievances. At one point, Naomi talks with her friend Francine, the director of admissions at Webster. And Francine shrewdly characterizes this new mutation of campus protest in the internet age.
Naomi says (reading), my door has been open for months. What kind of protest declines dialogue with its opponent? A modern one, Francine said dryly. These kids are not like we were. Interaction across the battle lines isn't what they're after. They want to represent something to their peers more than they want to gain respect from their opponents. Or accomplish anything, Naomi said, rolling her eyes. Oh, said Francine, they're accomplishing plenty. They're compiling influence, gaining likes, getting retweeted. That's part of it, Francine replied, no point denying it.
One of the causes of the protest turns out to be the fact that a popular anthropology professor has been denied tenure. Because he's African-American, students accuse Webster of institutional racism. Naomi and the tenure committee have to remain silent for legal reasons, even though they know that the professor is guilty of something more damning than suspiciously high Rate-My-Professor scores, complementing his astronomically inflated grades. When a young student, a Palestinian refugee named Omar Khayal, emerges as the professor's most eloquent defender, the situation becomes so heated Naomi has real cause to fear that she'll be ousted from the presidency of Webster.
"The Devil And Webster" is wittily on target about, among other things, social class and privilege, silencing, old school feminist ambivalence about power and Korelitz's home subject, the insanity of the college admissions process. But its central dilemma, whether we can form a cosmopolitan community where we affirm our individual identities yet remain connected to one another, is, in realistic fashion, no closer to being resolved by the time we get to the end of the book.
DAVIES: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "The Devil And Webster" by Jean Hanff Korelitz.
On tomorrow's show, the story of one of the most important American Catholic leaders of the 20th century. A woman whose early years included a Bohemian lifestyle in New York, an abortion and a child born out of wedlock. Dorothy Day co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement for social justice, which still exists today. She's now a candidate for sainthood. We'll talk with her granddaughter Kate Hennessy, author of "A New Biography." Hope you can join us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our engineer is Adam Staniszewski. Our associate producer for online media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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"Smart, Satirical 'Devil And Webster' Takes On College Identity Politics." Fresh Air, 22 Mar. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A487324207/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9417188d. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
The Devil and Webster
Jean Hanff Korelitz. Grand Central, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-1-4555-9238-8
Korelitz (Admission) raids the current news climate for this hot-topic read about diversity, protest, and "liberal idiocy" on the campus of progressive Webster College, headed by its first female and Jewish president, Naomi Roth, a feminist academic with her own radical past. Roth's pride in Webster's evolution from white male homogeneity to carefully culled inclusion is tested by the denial of tenure to popular black professor Nicholas Gall, which spawns a massive student movement to protect him led by Omar Khayal, a charismatic Palestinian student. Though Roth prides herself on speaking "truth to power," when she is the "establishment" her words fall on deaf ears. They fail to impress even her own daughter, Hannah, a member of the protest movement; best friend, Francine, the college's admissions dean going through her own academic crisis; and the restive college board. There's much to ponder in this dense political and social debate, and it's as overwhelming to Naomi as it is to readers, who, though pitying her no-win situation, can see the hypocrisy that blinds her. Ultimately, it isn't the political twist that's so riveting in Korelitz's morality tale, but the apolitical, ageless struggle of a mother letting go of her daughter, a fact "so very ordinary, but ... everything, too." (Mar.)
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"The Devil and Webster." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 4, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A479714148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=513c6318. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Korelitz is an audacious writer who delivers on her promises. Her next big-screen adaptation surely awaits."
Not every 350-page novel can be torn through in a weekend, but readers may find themselves batting away sleep and setting an alarm for early the next day to continue Jean Hanff Korelitz's propulsive literary thriller, The Plot (Celadon, $28, 9781250790767). Considering the success of Korelitz's previous bestseller, You Should Have Known, which became HBO's "The Undoing" starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, her skill at ratcheting up the tension should come as no surprise.
The Plot is an ingenious piece of storytelling--a story within a story, two plots for the price of one. Jacob Finch Bonner is a washed-up novelist whose debut book led to a brief dalliance with literary success, but that was years ago, and he has since slipped off the radar. At the novel's start, Jake is scraping by, teaching at a poorly ranked MFA program. When one of Jake's students, Evan Parker, reveals the twisty plot behind his yet-to-be-written novel, which Evan is convinced will be a bestseller, Jake begrudgingly concedes that literary fame surely beckons.
A few years pass, and when Jake doesn't hear anything about the novel or its author, he does some online snooping and is shocked to discover that Evan died a few months after the residency. So Jake writes the novel that never was, titles it Crib and becomes a publishing sensation. But things start to unravel when he begins to receive anonymous threats accusing him of theft.
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to structure The Plot the way Korelitz has--to claim that Crib will be a surefire bestseller, and then in case we doubt her, to share parts of Crib to reveal just how good it is. But Korelitz is an audacious writer who delivers on her promises. Her next big-screen adaptation surely awaits.
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Vasishta, Jeff. "The Plot By Jean Hanff Korelitz." BookPage, May 2021, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A702428884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62b1a045. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot is an addictive Russian nesting doll of a novel where every character's hand fits neatly into someone else's pocket."
Jean Hanff Korelitz's ''The Plot'' is an addictive Russian nesting doll of a novel where every character's hand fits neatly into someone else's pocket.
Welcome to Group Text, a monthly column for readers and book clubs about the novels, memoirs and short-story collections that make you want to talk, ask questions and dwell in another world for a little bit longer.
If you're a person who harbors notions about the glamour of the writing life, THE PLOT (Celadon, 336 pp., $28) will jettison them to the deepest, darkest trench of the ocean floor. If you're a novelist who has endured the humiliation of a reading with no audience, Jean Hanff Korelitz's latest novel will help you laugh about the empty room. And if you're a reader who likes stories where a terrible decision snowballs out of control, this book is just what the librarian ordered. Welcome to a spectacular avalanche.
Jacob Finch Bonner is a washed-up golden boy novelist when a floppy-haired student named Evan Parker turns up in his graduate-level writing class at Ripley College in Vermont. (Picture the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference housed in a cinder-block mausoleum instead of a yellow barn.) Parker informs his teacher and classmates that he has a surefire best seller up his sleeve -- one that will land him a film deal, a spot on Oprah's couch and ''all the brass rings.''
''This story will be read by everybody,'' Evan brags. ''It will make a fortune.'' He's even considering adopting a nom de plume for the sake of privacy. As his instructor wryly observes, ''For most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.''
Jake isn't dazzled by an excerpt from Parker's book, but when the young man regales the class with the basics of the story, it makes an impression. Two and a half years later, still down on his luck and now clinging to the outermost fringes of the literary world, Jake learns that Evan Parker overdosed before completing his masterpiece.
So Jake Bonner borrows the basics of the plot -- a simple (or so it seems) mother-daughter saga -- and writes the novel himself. When ''Crib'' comes out, accolades rain down on our semi-deserving protagonist. Jake becomes a New York Times best seller; his events sell out 2,400-seat theaters; his paperback receives the most coveted of book club benedictions (no, not this one). Jake is en route to Los Angeles to meet with an A-list director, having just shared coffee with a potential love interest, when he receives a four-word email that brings his victory lap to a grinding halt. It says, ''You are a thief.''
At first, Jake ignores a string of increasingly threatening dispatches. But then ''Talented Tom'' (as the harasser calls himself, evoking ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'') takes to Twitter, contacts Jake's publisher and sends a letter to his home. By this point, we've watched Jake progress from an apartment on aptly named Poverty Lane to Manhattan's West Village, where he finally has a real home (and a cat); and, I have to admit, we're rooting for the guy. We've looked past his self-involvement and toxic pride, not a hard thing to do. Now we start to wonder if our loyalty is misplaced. Did Jake earn his new life or is it all just stolen finery?
Korelitz tells us that Jake ''had not taken one single word from those pages he'd read back at Ripley.'' But, ever since he'd typed ''Chapter One'' into his laptop, ''he'd been waiting, horribly waiting, for someone who knew the answer to this very question -- How'd you come up with it? -- to rise to their feet and point their finger in accusation.''
Jake's search for Talented Tom takes him on a cat-and-mouse odyssey from Vermont to Georgia, from a local tavern to a lawyer's office to a creepy campground and a graveyard. His detective instincts are so spot on, I started to wonder if he might have a second career as a sleuth.
I won't spoil the ending. But, as a longtime fan of Korelitz's novels (including ''You Should Have Known,'' which was made into HBO's ''The Undoing''), I will say that I think ''The Plot'' is her gutsiest, most consequential book yet. It keeps you guessing and wondering, and also keeps you thinking: about ambition, fame and the nature of intellectual property (the analog kind). Are there a finite number of stories? Is there a statute of limitations on ownership of unused ideas? These weighty questions mingle with a love story, a mystery and a striver's journey -- three of the most satisfying flavors of fiction out there.
Jake Bonner's insecurity, vulnerability and fear are familiar to those of us who have faced a blank screen, wondering how or whether we'll be able to scramble letters into a story. Korelitz takes these creative hindrances and turns them into entertainment. Not only does she make it look easy, she keeps us guessing until the very end.
[ Read an excerpt from ''The Plot.'' ]
Discussion Questions
What were your thoughts on the chapters from ''Crib''? (It took me a while to get my bearings but once I did I wanted to read the whole book.)
That ending! Did you see it coming? Did we meet anyone along the way who might have understood what happened?
Suggested Reading
''Misery,'' by Stephen King. This is the novel that flipped ''I'm your No. 1 fan'' from compliment to taunt. After a car accident, a popular novelist finds himself trapped in a farmhouse with a nurse who has strong opinions about his work. ''This novel is more than just a splendid exercise in horror,'' our critic wrote. ''Its subject is not merely torture, but the torture of being a writer.''
''Luster,'' by Raven Leilani. In Leilani's debut, a young Black artist who is struggling to make ends meet gets tangled up with an older, white, married colleague at her thankless publishing job. Like Jake, Edie is a complicated character whose choices you may not always applaud. But who wants to read about someone who always does the ''right'' thing?
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Egan, Elisabeth. "'The Plot,' by Jean Hanff Korelitz." The New York Times Book Review, 16 May 2021, p. 15(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A661890210/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=86fba90c. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Gripping and thoroughly unsettling: This one will be flying off the shelves."
Korelitz, Jean Hanff THE PLOT Celadon Books (Fiction None) $24.99 5, 11 ISBN: 978-1-250-79076-7
A washed-up novelist finds bestselling success with a story purloined from an arrogant student. What could possibly go wrong?
Pretty much everything in Korelitz’s satisfyingly twisty thriller. But at first, when Jacob Finch Bonner learns about the sudden death of Evan Parker, the jerk who'd swaggered into his office at a 10th-rate low-residency MFA program and shared the outrageous plot premise that was going to make him rich and famous, it seems as though taking the idea and making it his own is perfectly safe. Three years later, the resulting novel, Crib, has sold 2 million copies in nine months, and Jake has met wonderful Anna Williams, the program director of a radio show he visits while on tour in Seattle. But then he gets an email from TalentedTom@gmail.com proclaiming, “You are a thief,” and his new life threatens to unravel. Korelitz teasingly alternates the story of Jake’s desperate quest to find out who this anonymous accuser is and how he knows about Evan’s idea with chapters from Crib—just enough to stoke curiosity about what exactly this fabulous plot device is. Alert readers will guess some of the twists in advance as Jake follows the trail to Evan’s family home in Vermont and slowly realizes Evan didn’t invent this shocking story but lifted it from the real life of someone who is very, very angry about it; Korelitz plays fair and plants clues throughout. But only the shrewdest will anticipate the jaw-dropping final revelation. (Hint: Think about those Talented Mr. Ripley references.) Korelitz, who demonstrated in Admission (2009) and You Should Have Known (2014) that she knows how to blend suspense with complex character studies, falls a little short on the character end here; Jake is a sympathetic but slightly bland protagonist, and Anna has the only other fully developed personality. No one will care as the story hurtles toward the creepy climax, in the best tradition of Patricia Highsmith and other chroniclers of the human psyche’s darkest depths.
Gripping and thoroughly unsettling: This one will be flying off the shelves.
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"Korelitz, Jean Hanff: THE PLOT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A653125798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=83eaa302. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
Plagiarism, copying, theft; call it what you will. Each of these terms guarantees consequences, whether you're a student, a politician or a writer.
Jean Hanff Korelitz explores the extent of literary plagiarism in her upcoming novel "The Plot." The novel follows Jacob Finch Bonner, or Jake, a "once promising author" whose first novel was labeled "New & Noteworthy" by the New York Times Book Review. However, his following work failed to live up to expectations, which is where "The Plot" begins.
The premise of the novel seems enthralling, especially when taking Korelitz's own success into consideration. Two of her novels have been adapted for the screen, including her 2014 book "You Should Have Known," whose HBO adaptation, "The Undoing," received critical acclaim. Starring actors Nicole Kidman ("Big Little Lies") and Hugh Grant ("Notting Hill"), "The Undoing" was HBO's most-watched show of 2020, and received a handful of nominations from several awards shows, including the Golden Globes. But past the storyline, "The Plot" falls short of achieving a similar enchantment.
Like "You Should Have Known," Korelitz's "The Plot" is a thriller. However, unlike her previous work, "The Plot" is not as engaging of a read. Jake, increasingly glum about his literary failures, is a rather insufferable character. Humiliated by his fate, he struggles to speak to other writers, and he cannot even think about them without launching into a spiral of self-pity. Unable to start or finish any sort of draft, Jake takes to teaching and meets Evan Parker, an emerging writer and obnoxious character. Evan is resolute in the fact that he has the most amazing plot that "no matter how lousy a writer he is, (no one) could mess up."
Jake sits in front of this naïve, conceited writer and is both annoyed and amused. But then Evan leans forward and tells him everything -- from the start of the wicked plot to its astonishing finale -- and Jake realizes he's right. There's no way this novel can fail.
From this scene introducing the fantastic, titular plot, a thriller reader would reasonably expect the novel to pick up. However, the following sections of the novel move slowly. Part two moves forward two and a half years, and we find Jake roughly in the same place. He has neglected his writing, is stuck in odd teaching positions and is riddled with insecurities. Though it's obvious Evan is an integral character, he is practically forgotten in part two. Instead, Korelitz attempts to deliver suspense through ending chapters with cliché remarks about how Jake's life is about to change dramatically: "How many times, looking back at this night, the very last night of a time he would always afterward think of as 'before,' would he wish that he hadn't been so utterly, fatally wrong?"
Mild relief from the mundanity comes when Jake finally checks back in with Evan and finds Evan dead and his remarkable plot unwritten. But that development is only followed by yet another predictable reveal. Part three begins with another time jump when Jake, the rather pathetic character we started with, is now the author of the best-selling novel, "Crib," whose unexpected plot shocks the world. Who would have guessed that a failing author would steal the work of a character conveniently introduced and killed off several chapters later? "The Plot" wastes countless chapters complicating and dragging out a simple premise: Man steals dead student's work. The entire first half of the novel could have easily been condensed into a single paragraph.
Korelitz's pacing leaves much to be desired. It's not until the middle of the novel that the real conflict is introduced. As Jake is on the rise, he receives a series of brief emails from an unknown user under the name Talented Tom, who implies there is more to Evan's "plot" than Jake understands. This leads Jake to investigate the late student and his peculiar past. Korelitz supplements Jake's investigation with chapters of "Crib" and reveals that the plot is worth plagiarizing, the kind of plot someone might kill for. As Jake uncovers more about Evan Parker and his late family, the excerpts from "Crib" make Evan's miraculous plot seem less fictional with every passing day.
The inclusion of the story within the story was the best choice Korelitz could've made. "Crib" honors the suspenseful aspects of the thriller that "The Plot" is unable to achieve on its own. I was more excited to read the excerpts from "Crib" than I was to accompany Jake on his journey to uncover the truth, which was frustratingly foreseeable and almost too easy. I knew how the novel would end four chapters prior to what should have been the final emotional punch. Korelitz spelled too much out for us and consequently took the thrill out of the thriller.
Though I was intrigued by the premise and remained interested throughout the novel's progression, I was disappointed by her techniques and the predictability of it all. I was eager to be shocked, startled and scared like Korelitz's past thrillers have left me, but "The Plot" is a slow burn. Instead of striking the reader with unexpected twists and turns, Korelitz's momentum is steady and unsurprising.
Perhaps it was my own expectations that caused the downfall of the novel, given my initial enthusiasm that Korelitz's past work had provoked. It's worth the read if you are interested, but it guarantees more disappointment than excitement or exhilaration.
Daily Arts Writer Lilly Pearce can be reached at pearcel@umich.edu.
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Pearce, Lilly. "Author of 'The Undoing' fails to live up to expectations in her new novel 'The Plot'." UWIRE Text, 20 Apr. 2021, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A659004441/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d478568d. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "a satisfyingly twisty tale rooted in complex characterizations."
Korelitz, Jean Hanff THE LATECOMER Celadon Books (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 31 ISBN: 978-1-250-79079-8
A fatal car crash sets the stage for a fraught marriage and family life.
Drifting through his privileged existence, 20-year-old Salo Oppenheimer is further unmoored after a Jeep he's driving flips and kills two passengers. On a subsequent trip to Europe, a rapturous encounter with a Cy Twombly painting launches his passionate engagement with cutting-edge art. He's less engaged with Johanna Hirsch, even though he marries her (it's expected) and, after three childless years, agrees to IVF, which results in four embryos and the birth of triplets Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally. Salo's real life is in the Brooklyn warehouse where he keeps his art collection--and with Stella, a fellow survivor of the crash whom he meets again some years later; soon they are lovers and have a son. Korelitz deftly limns this tension-riddled setup and the resulting Oppenheimer family dysfunction. Harrison, supersmart and arrogant, looks down on his siblings. Shut-off Lewyn seems to have imbibed his brother's dismissive assessment of him. Sally keeps secrets from herself and others. Johanna, wracked by a longing for connection neither her children nor husband care to fulfill, learns of Salo's other family on the eve of the triplets' departure for college and decides to have the fourth embryo thawed and gestated by a surrogate; Phoebe is born in June 2000, shortly before Lewyn and Sally depart for determinedly separate lives at Cornell and Harrison for an ultra-alternative school that, somewhat paradoxically, nurtures his aggressively conservative views. Part 2, which chronicles the triplets' college years, is long and at times alienating; Korelitz makes no attempt to soften the siblings' often mean behavior, which climaxes in an ugly scene at their 19th birthday party in September 2001. It pays off in Part 3, narrated by latecomer Phoebe, now 17 and charged with healing her family's gaping wounds. The resolution, complete with a wedding, persuasively and touchingly affirms that even the most damaged people can grow and change.
A bit slow in the middle section but on balance, a satisfyingly twisty tale rooted in complex characterizations.
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"Korelitz, Jean Hanff: THE LATECOMER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A693214815/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eeb32b12. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
THE LATECOMER by Jean HanffKorelitz 560pp, Faber, T PS8.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP PS8.99, ebook PS5.59....
The American author Jean Hanf f Korelitz has a knack for producing smart, psychologically astute page-turners. The Plot, pivoting on a case of identity theft, was 2021's most entertaining highbrow beach read, while her adaptation of her noirish 2014 thriller You Should Have Known (retitled The Undoing) was HBO's most watched TV show of 2020. Her new novel, The Latecomer, combines her interests in constructed identities and marital disarray within a mazy, old-fashioned Jonathan Franzen-style family saga.
The Oppenheimers are certainly a family unhappy in their very own way. Salo, of wealthy Jewish stock, is haunted by the deaths of two highschool friends, killed when the car he was driving hit a rock in the road. Despite the loving ministrations of his wife, Johanna, he struggles to find solace in family life, laboriously achieved after the sixth round of IVF produced triplets. Yet even as toddlers, his two sons and daughter nurture an implacable mutual loathing that only grows as they approach adulthood.
Poor Johanna, meanwhile, maintains a vice-like grip on her willed illusion of family harmony, papering the staircase walls in their Brooklyn townhouse with birthday photographs of her brood, and ignoring the way her husband spends nearly all his spare time with his art collection, in a nearby warehouse. Only when she finds out what else he is up to does she fish her final frozen embryo out of storage and, with the help of a "gestational carrier", has another baby, Phoebe, just as her three older children are making good their escape to college.
Korelitz writes with such effortless fluidity, you can almost see the sentences gushing, fully formed, onto the page. She takes luxurious time in detailing every inch of her canvas, be it Salo's restless "tumbling" sensations in the years after the accident - from which he suddenly finds respite in the transfixing presence of a painting by a then-unknown Cy Twombly - or the triplets' adolescent struggles to work out who they are. She's the sort of writer who will happily devote a page or two to a potted history of a stray brother who never appears. And she slips inside the heads of each Oppenheimer with such easy, confiding intimacy that we see the world just as they do.
She's also effervescently funny on the quagmire of modern American identity politics. The triplets, Harrison, Sally and Lewyn, attend the sort of school that doesn't award grades and forgoes the classics in favour of classes on interpersonal conflict resolution. There's an amusing scene in which Lewyn attends a college mock-Passover feast with his Mormon frat friends, in which an orange has been placed next to the lamb and horseradish to symbolise "the inclusion of all sexualities and genders". Harrison, a staunch believer in meritocracy, bucks against the "anti-intellectualism" of his school and seeks out fellow-minded male conservatives at a college that rejects liberal orthodoxies. Yet it's a pity that Korelitz, having given credibility to both sides of the culture wars, then rigs the debate against Harrison, who develops from a not entirely unreasonable iconoclast into a pundit whose quasi-white-supremacist views make him a staple on Fox TV.
Yet despite its supreme writerly confidence, The Latecomer feels like a fairly sloppy book. Much of the drama hinges on the triplets' fomenting hostility, yet with no reason given, the reader struggles to buy into the psychological dynamics. It's nearly always dubious when a novelist invokes 9/11 for plot purposes; Korelitz's use of it here to generate a family tragedy feels expedient. Various thematic threads, notably the human instinct to hoard, wend through the narrative, yet in a novel that is stronger in breadth than in depth, their metaphorical resonance is diffuse and whimsical rather than satisfying.
As the novel proceeds, Korelitz's approach to plot becomes ever more reminiscent of a good fairy madly waving her wand. The final third is narrated by Phoebe, now 17, who resolves to sort out her family once and for all with a sequence of interventions as magically efficacious as the denouement to any Shakespearean comedy. There's a bizarre and seismic revelation concerning Harrison's best friend, a black academic, but it is dispatched so briskly that it leaves the poor reader gasping to draw breath. The quixotic effect is surely intentional, yet this reader felt short-changed.
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"'The Undoing' author comes undone; This Franzen-style family saga about rich triplets who hate each other starts well - but ends as neatly as a Shakespearean comedy." Daily Telegraph [London, England], 16 July 2022, p. 15. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A710356079/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ab440a8. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
I've been asked many strange and even personal questions about my new novel, The Latecomer, which follows the travails and entanglements of wealthy New York triplets and their fourth sibling, born many years later by means of a leftover frozen embryo. Of all the things people want to know, however, most of the questions seem to be about... Mormons.
What's a nice Jewish atheist like myself doing writing about Mormons? Is it true that I dragged my long-suffering husband FIVE TIMES to a field in western New York state, in order to attend a strange annual ritual created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and known as the Hill Cumorah Pageant? Do I see myself in Lewyn Oppenheimer, one of the triplets in the novel, who is so drawn to the religion that he nearly converts?
Well, it's complicated, and no, I never personally got close to conversion (though I continue to hope that Mormon missionaries will knock on my door), and yes: that is absolutely true about the Hill Cumorah Pageant. My husband may well be a saint in this regard, though not of the Latter-Day variety.
The incident that first turned my attention to Mormon culture, beliefs and history was far closer to my own culture as a New York Jew; namely, a Broadway show (and if you've guessed that the show in question was The Book of Mormon... you're wrong.) In 2008, I went to a revival of Hair in Central Park, a production that was and remains one of the best things I've ever seen on a stage. The two actors who led the cast, Jonathan Groff and Will Swenson, had something interesting in common; each had been raised in a religious Christian community that felt far beyond the mainstream of American religion, Groff as a Mennonite and Swenson as a Mormon.
Mennonites and Mormons in musical theatre? Groff may well be the first of his kind to become a Broadway star, but Swenson came from a bona fide theatre family, and in time I would learn that theatre is a cherished tradition in Mormon culture, a phenomenon dating back to the fact that Brigham Young, the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, himself enjoyed a nice musical. That in itself was crucial to the creation of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a hugely ambitious annual work of community theatre with over 700 amateur participants, presented on a vast open-air stage that is built into the actual Hill Cumorah (where Mormon prophet Joseph Smith reputedly excavated golden plates containing sacred texts). The pageant has been presented every summer since 1937.
Naturally, as soon as I heard about the Pageant, I wanted to see it. The ultimate site-specific outdoor theatre illuminating this fascinating American religion? Sign me up! In 2009, my husband and I took our first trip out to Palmyra (a very long drive from New York City, through an agricultural and politically unrecognisable upstate we urban types tend to willfully ignore -- to our peril as a country, as it turned out).
Because the pageant would not begin until the sun had set, we spent that long summer day taking in the Latter Day Saints (LDS) sights, notably the printer's shop where Joseph Smith's "Golden Bible" (as The Book of Mormon was first derogatorily nicknamed) was first published, and the Smith farm, restored by the Church to a simulation of Joseph's time.
I tore around the Sacred Grove behind the farm looking for what I imagined was the specific location of Joseph Smith's angelic vision. The woods were full of visitors, yet quiet and peaceful, and I imagined that the others -- obviously church members -- must know exactly where they were supposed to go. I, on the other hand, made a long and frustrating loop through the trees without ever finding that place. Finally, I approached an elderly couple and asked them where the Sacred Grove was. They looked at each other, perplexed and amused.
"You're in it," the husband said. This was undoubtedly a metaphor for my spiritual encounter with Mormonism.
Back at the Hill Cumorah, we still had hours to wait for sunset, but the pre-show turned out to be as riveting as the pageant itself. Travelling to historical Mormon sites is a cherished summer tradition for LDS families, and the July Pageant is the highlight. Utah and Idaho license plates filled the field across the road from the Pageant stage, and huge family groups loaded up on roast chicken and a local delicacy known as "salt potatoes".
Hundreds of pageant participants swarmed the field, dressed like something from a swords-and-sandals epic. There were warriors and shepherds, ancient tribesmen of the Americas, and a few folks whose bizarre costumes absolutely defied any known association. Still, the people portraying these characters glowed with 21st century health and had sparkling, perfect American teeth.
They moved through the audience, speaking to us, asking us whether this was our first pageant and where we had come from, and wondering whether we had any questions about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Of course I had questions, though by this time I had read (or, at least, skimmed) The Book of Mormon, as well as many works of non-fiction that were emphatically not carried in the LDS bookstore in Palmyra, and I was far too polite to ask those questions. Besides, like virtually every Mormon I've ever met, they were absolutely lovely.
The proselytising is an important and meaningful part of the pageant, and though I assumed -- correctly -- that the lion's share of attendees were already Church members, the sheer dearth of things to do in this region of upstate New York meant that plenty of non-Mormon locals turn up for the show. (Despite the fact that the Church began on that very site and was consecrated a few miles to the east, in an early member's homestead, there aren't many Mormons still living in and around Palmyra, New York.)
When the sun set, the actors gathered in their "Cast Teams" (one team was stationed right beside our seats) and swarmed up onto the multi-leveled stage, hundreds of brightly costumed human bodies dwarfed by the scale of the hill and the field of chairs before it. I knew the story we were about to see, but I was still amazed by the theatricality of it all: a vision of Christ on Calvary, a boat built onstage for an ocean voyage, complete with lashing rain and thunder, generations of warring tribes (in their arresting costumes), a starkly lit saviour hanging high in the air over the stage, and finally an ersatz Joseph Smith himself digging a hole high up on the Hill Cumorah and then surrounded by his first followers. (We'd seen this actor during the pre-show. Everyone seemed to want a selfie with him.)
Finally, the recorded voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir rolled out over the dark field. People all around me were crying and praying. I did neither, but it would be wrong to say that I wasn't astonished by it all. The Pageant was a massive undertaking involving scores of ordinary, inexperienced and very unprofessional participants, and yet it had been a flawlessly presented spectacle.
I went back four times over the next decade. I never lost my fascination for the thing, and I began to understand that I wasn't the only non-Mormon who'd made the trek to that field in Palmyra. Anyone who attends the Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, for example, may see the Pageant's influence on the show's opening moments. (Trey Parker and Matt Stone, don't tell me you didn't go to Hill Cumorah!)
The makers of the great HBO series Big Love pulled off a considerable coup when they actually filmed -- by stealth, I assume -- a series of scenes for its Season Three episode "Come, Ye Saints", with the Pageant actually in progress in the background. (Watch for an otherworldly moment in which the modern polygamist Bill Hendricksen prays for guidance as Jesus rises in the night sky above him.) And the writer Avi Steinberg, whose own fascination with Mormon history (and insight into Joseph Smith's literary opus) is chronicled in his brilliant The Lost Book of Mormon, had a far more participatory encounter with the Pageant, requiring the kind of nerve I, personally, do not possess.
In early 2020, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints announced that that summer's Pageant would end the 84-year tradition. (An article in the Deseret News would later explain that, in an "increasingly worldwide Church...the cost of current and future maintenance, security and safety upgrades running into several millions of dollars" could not be justified "when only a relative handful of members and visitors would benefit from the experience." I raced to plan one more trip to see it, this time bringing the friend whose open-air production of Hair had actually conjured my Mormon rabbit hole years earlier, but the pandemic intervened and that final production never took place. The Hill Cumorah Pageant has officially concluded, an anti-climactic ending to one of the most unique theatrical traditions America has produced.
The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz is published by Faber at £8.99 on Aug 4. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
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Hill Cumorah Pageant is an annual Mormon reenactment of the story of Jesus
Credit: Jean Hanff Korelitz
The cast of the Pageant assembles alongside Jean Hanff Korelitz's husband Paul Muldoon
Credit: Jean Hanff Korelitz
The stage and audience at the Hill Cumorah Pageant
Credit: Jean Hanff Korelitz
Actors portraying the Three Wise Men or Magi
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"Forget The Book of Mormon -- I went to the Mormons' own theatrical spectacular, and it was bizarre; How a trip to the Hill Cumorah Pageant, in which 700 amateur Mormon actors tell the Bible story, inspired Jean Hanff Korelitz's new novel." Telegraph Online, 21 July 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711088800/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4026a998. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "The Latecomer is a character-driven story--a gripping doorstopper that you read in the bathtub until the water is cold."
It took a shott but phenomenally productive detour-writing a different book in a whirlwind four months during the pandemic--for Jean Hanff Korelitz to realize what wasn't working in her forthcoming novel, The Latecomer (Celadon, May). When Korelitz had met with her editor, Celadon's Deb Futter, to talk about the structural difficulties she was having with The Latecomer, she got some unexpected, if invaluable, advice. Futter told Korelitz to focus on a new book instead.
"What she said to me," Korelitz recalls, "was, 'Put down this book. Just put it down--because you need some distance from it. And write this other thing.' "
"This other thing" was a book Korelitz, 60, pitched on the spot in the meeting--a twisty tale of a writing teacher who steals a story idea from a former student. That book, The Plot, was published last year, to much acclaim.
Touted by Stephen King as "one of the best novels I've ever read about writers and writing," The Plot, which has been Korelitz's most successful novel to date, changed her writing life. Yes, she's had success and is no stranger to Hollywood--her novels You Should Have Known and Admission have both been adapted to the screen (the former as the HBO series The Undoing, the latter as the same-titled 2003 film)--but The Plot put her on the literary map in a new way. (And it's been optioned by Hulu for series adaptation, with Korelitz attached as a writer.) The Plot also helped her get to The Latecomer.
The Latecomer is a character-driven story--a gripping doorstopper that you read in the bathtub until the water is cold. In writing it, Korelitz was after the immersive pleasure she had when she first encountered John Irving's The World According to Garp in the 1970s. "Everybody was reading Garp," she explains. "And we were all having this incredibly satisfying, thrilling reading experience."
The Latecomer is about a deeply flawed American family. It centers on the Oppenheimer clan: Salo, the wealthy patriarch who prizes his art collection over all else; his wife Johanna, whose dream was always to become a mother; and their triplets, Sally, Harrison, and Lewyn, born through IVF. It's also the story of Phoebe, the fourth child, who is born via a surrogate when Johanna is 48 and her other children are heading off to college.
In the novel, Korelitz explores the fissures between the family members--especially the triplets. Each child is adrift, searching for their purpose: Harrison is a pompous intellectual who goes to a school called Roarke (the name a reference to the character Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead); Sally believes she has discovered her true calling when she meets an antiques picker; and Lewyn finds solace in Mormonism.
Speaking over Zoom from the Manhattan apartment she shares with her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon, Korelitz explains that she found inspiration for the novel in her own life. She owns some posters and a framed letter by the outsider artist Achilles G. Rizzoli, whose art plays a role in the novel. The Mormonism thread is related to Korelitz's fascination with the religion, as an atheist who has attended the Hill Cumorah Pageant (an annual event mounted by the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Palmyra, N.Y.) five times. And Harrison's dedication to the canon aligns with Korelitz's greatest regret when it comes to her education: that she never learned Latin.
Korelitz's children, now grown, have followed their parents into the arts: her daughter is a songwriter and her son works in musical theater. It's something she appreciates.
"One day when I was upstairs writing The Plot and Paul was downstairs working on a poem," she says, "both of our kids sort of checked in and said, 'Oh, I wrote something today, and I'm really happy with it.' And I just thought, Oh, my God, I'm so lucky. You know, I'm so lucky."
Korelitz's first novel is a legal thriller, but she says she didn't want to keep writing the same character. "Ever since rhen, I've kind of gone back and forth over this net of plot versus literary, sometimes landing more on one side, sometimes landing on the other side. I just hope that readers will allow themselves to enter this world, with no bodies on the floor and no smoking guns, and see that there are other crimes, other plot twists, and other satisfactions."
It's not quite true, though, that there are no bodies on the floor in The Latecomer. We learn in the opening chaptet that as a teenager, Salo was involved in a fatal car crash, and the weight hangs over him. This event informs much of his life as he grows older and becomes a husband and father, and he deals with the guilt in several ways, including collecting expensive art. (Korelitz says she turned to her friend Steve Martin for guidance on the collection: "He has an amazing art collection. He thinks about art all the time. And he has a very powerful grasp of movements and phases and themes.")
Salo owns several of Rizzoli's works, which take on special significance for him because of what they mean to a woman he falls in love with. But he discovers that surrounding himself with art doesn't alleviate his pain.
Korelitz says some people have told her they don't want to read about the rich anymore. "But there are always things that we can learn from studying them," she adds. "Most of us don't have those lives and are always curious to know how other people are living. It's such a minefield right now--what we're allowed to write. And I feel like to capitulate to any of this is just such a dangerous, slippery slope. I would never tell anybody what they're allowed to write. And I really hope nobody ever tells me what I'm allowed to write."
She likes to think about how people use and misuse their wealth. "I'm also interested in watching people bungle their opportunities," she says.
Privilege is at the heart of this story, along with numerous other subjects such as religion, education, hoarding, right wing politics, reproductive technology, and infidelity--but it takes the latecomer herself, the fourth child, to connect all of the dots.
"You'd think somebody who's written a whole book called The Plot would be a plotter, but I'm not," Korelitz says. What was important to her was figuring out who her characters were. "I think maybe that's why I went so wrong with this book, initially: I really didn't know them. And it took a long time to know them, because some of them are pretty deceitful and withholding people."
BY MICHELE FILGATE
Micbele Filgate is the editor of the anthology What My Mother and I Don't Talk About and a writer whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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Filgate, Michele. "Family Matters: Jean Hanff Korelitz focuses on an unhappy family in her new novel, The Latecomer." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 11, 14 Mar. 2022, pp. 36+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A697982851/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7439483d. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "both the rich plot and the nuanced characters."
Family Saga
When college student Salo Oppen-heimer's Jeep tumbles off a road near campus, two of the vehicle's passengers--Salo's girlfriend and a close friend--are killed on impact. While Salo's physical injuries are barely noticeable, his emotional scars will shape the rest of his life.
Despite Salo's skepticism about his ability (or even if he deserves) to be happy, he marries and fathers triplets. His wife, Johanna, wants children more than anything, so she endures fertility procedures to conceive Harrison, Lewyn and Sally. But the triplets don't fill the emotional vacancies created by her husband, and when the children leave for college, Johanna tells Salo she's going to return to the couple's remaining blastocyst. Seventeen years after their births, the Oppenheimer siblings reluctantly welcome a fourth.
In The Latecomer (Celadon, $28, 9781250790798), Jean Hanff Korelitz (The Plot) guides readers through the Oppenheimers' tumultuous--and often emotionally impoverished--family history. The novel sprawls across 45 years and more than 400 pages, offering each segment of the family ample time to tell their stories: the parents, the triplets and the latecomer herself, Phoebe.
Korelitz embeds a vast range of details within the tale, from the procedures necessary for the children's births to the art collection that pulls Salo away from his family, from the family's Jewish history to a character's fascination with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. An extensive network of subplots helps to define the characters' relationships to one another, though all this groundwork-laying can feel frustrating; the promised title character, whose birth is an intrusion to her siblings' lives, isn't mentioned until more than 100 pages in and doesn't step to center stage until the novel's final third. But this delay allows Korelitz to develop both the rich plot and the nuanced characters who populate it.
Ultimately, Phoebe's late arrival encourages the rest of the Oppenheimers to realize how their father's life-changing car crash altered all of their lives. The Latecomer's blending of family history and research explores how generational trauma can change everything, even for those who don't know about the incident at its center.
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 BookPage
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Whitley, Carla Jean. "The Latecomer." BookPage, June 2022, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A702628467/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=902ab050. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Collecting can be a source of pain as well as joy, a vehicle for wishful thinking as well as self-discovery. Exploring each case, Korelitz combines moral inquiry with social satire. Like Wharton, she invites the reader to reflect, even as she paints a picture of privilege. A sumptuously wrapped gift, The Latecomer is a Gilded Age novel for the 21st century."
In ''The Latecomer,'' Jean Hanff Korelitz takes on complicated family dynamics, infidelity, race, class, religion, guilt, art and real estate.
THE LATECOMER, By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Test tubes adorn the cover of ''The Latecomer,'' glassware signifying the in vitro origins of Jean Hanff Korelitz's protagonists, the Oppenheimer triplets, Harrison, Lewyn and Sally. Our gifted narrator, who shall remain nameless so as not to spoil a wonderful twist, introduces us to these three, starting before conception -- and explores their family tree (roots to branches). The result is a sparkling novel that is in essence satirical and wise, in style old and new.
The Oppenheimers are a Jewish American success story. They live in a house on the Brooklyn Esplanade purchased in 1979; they summer on Martha's Vineyard. The father, Salo, runs the family investment firm, Wurttemberg Holdings. His wife, Joanna, is tenderhearted and self-sacrificing, ''a many-tentacled creature, staying on top of vaccinations and tutoring,'' vet appointments and care of her parents and in-laws.
Secular, assimilated and rich, the family inhabits a social world as exclusive in its way as that described by Edith Wharton -- but the Jews whom Wharton considered arrivistes have now arrived. The Oppenheimers fully inhabit New York City, and Korelitz proves herself a worthy successor to her sharp-eyed forebear. She is incisive as she probes Salo's view of his marriage: ''The fact that they didn't crowd each other or push their way into each other's daily affairs, that was a good thing. Wasn't it?'' Pitch perfect in her birth announcement: ''Thanks to our wonderful 'team' ... and of course our fabulous Gestational Carrier.'' Hilarious as she describes the fictional Walden School of Brooklyn Heights, ''where a frankly socialist ethos stood in bald contrast to soaring tuition.''
If this novel is funny, it is also cutting, a nearly forensic study of family conflict. Husband and wife are at odds; children pull away not only from their parents but from one another. Nimbly, Korelitz juggles the stories of each parent and child, weaving a tapestry of secrets, antipathies and private quests. This is a book with 19th-century scope, touching on politics, race, class, inheritance and real estate. Old-school headings alert the reader to events to come -- for instance, we arrive at Chapter 10, ''In which Lewyn Oppenheimer hears an epic and unsettling story.'' But the chapter titles provide sly postmodern commentary as well: Behold Chapter 25, ''In which plans are made for an earlier departure, and either a farce or a revenge tragedy reaches its inevitable conclusion.''
Korelitz's plot points are in some ways old-fashioned -- a tragic accident, an extramarital affair, a secret bequest, a mysterious letter -- and in some ways new: ''therapy goals,'' cancel culture. The struggles here are classic -- sibling rivalry, infidelity -- and also contemporary. Conceived in a lab, the Oppenheimer triplets maintain a chill, asserting their individuality in ways both creative and cruel. As a child, Sally throws away Harrison's chess medal. As Cornell students in adjacent dorms, Lewyn and Sally pretend they don't have a sibling on campus. What a blessing for these three and for the reader that Phoebe, frozen at the same time but born almost 19 years later, grows up with the perspective to decode and partially disarm her tragicomic family.
At times this book suffers from an embarrassment of riches. The plot is ingenious, the pacing brisk -- but the reader longs to delve deeper. Joanna fades into the background as her children grow. Her pain is palpable, but her main trait is denial. ''Their mother, as long as Lewyn could remember, had hoarded and imbued with great significance such tiny moments, all while seeing so little of who the three of them actually were.'' As Joanna clings to the illusion of family unity, she begins to ''slide away,'' and the reader loses her point of view as well. We see the consequences of her actions in the second half of the novel, but we can no longer access the mixture of pain and idealism motivating them.
Salo's response to art provides some of the best passages in the book. Encountering a painting by Cy Twombly, he faints, overcome by ''that orange, that red, those rhythmic loops, their valiant attempt to scribble something away.'' Here we glimpse something of the banker's soul as he responds to color and dynamic form, but the novel moves on quickly. Events overtake emotion, and we are left to view Salo as his wife and children do, as a cipher. His ''attentive self, his essential self'' slips offstage and off the page.
Self-aware and self-deprecating, Phoebe is an engaging young woman, summing up her own situation: ''Privilege and tragedy. The perfect storm for any adolescent.'' But her utility is such that in the final chapters of this complex book, she becomes a Swiss Army knife of a character -- interventionist (''I want to talk about some things''), girl detective (''So would you please tell me about the legal troubles?''), pardoner (''You didn't know it was the last thing you'd ever say to him'') and matchmaker (''Maybe it's something the two of you should talk about'').
As for the triplets, ''in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish'' -- their loathing becomes limiting. A more nuanced relationship would raise the stakes on the fateful night when the siblings turn on one another. In the event, their entrenched antipathy undercuts the drama of mutual betrayal.
In each case, the reader craves development and shading, but it's testament to Korelitz's achievement that her novel leaves us wanting more. Her tale is both compulsively readable and thought-provoking. Her writing is evocative, with rich descriptions of Outsider art, Shaker furniture, rabid parents at college night. We hear the ''distinctive suck and slap'' of a refrigerator door. We enter a college dorm room to find ''discarded clothing, candy wrappers and shoes that were often parted from their mates and bearing spring mud.''
''The Latecomer'' is consistently surprising. Its protagonists reinvent themselves with astonishing ingenuity. Fair warning to readers seeking ''likable characters'': The people here are fierce, and they fight dirty. The Oppenheimers dare you to love them -- and even when you don't, you cannot look away. The triplets are simply too original, too searching, too driven. We follow Lewyn on a spiritual quest. We watch Harrison expose the liberal pieties of his prep school and embrace a conservatism that is equally crude. We marvel at Sally, who hates her father but inherits his visual acuity.
This is a novel about collecting and assessing art, objects and experiences. It is therefore a novel about how to see -- how to contemplate a painting, how to spot the rare antique in a barn full of junk, how to uncover fraud. Korelitz shows how art reveals itself to viewers and how ownership illuminates character. Salo Oppenheimer's art possesses him, while Joanna's gallery wall of birthday photos commemorates her dashed hopes for a close-knit family. Collecting can be a source of pain as well as joy, a vehicle for wishful thinking as well as self-discovery. Exploring each case, Korelitz combines moral inquiry with social satire. Like Wharton, she invites the reader to reflect, even as she paints a picture of privilege. A sumptuously wrapped gift, ''The Latecomer'' is a Gilded Age novel for the 21st century.
Allegra Goodman's books include ''The Chalk Artist,'' ''Intuition'' and ''The Cookbook Collector.'' Her new novel, ''SAM,'' will be published next year.
THE LATECOMER, by Jean Hanff Korelitz | 448 pp. | Celadon | $28
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Goodman, Allegra. "Sibling Revelry." The New York Times Book Review, 5 June 2022, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A706020290/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=16455d3f. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
Byline: Maureen Corrigan
The Sequel
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Celadon. 304 pp. $29
- - -
Warning: Do not so much as glance at the first paragraphs of Jean Hanff Korelitz's âThe Sequelâ if you haven't already read its best-selling predecessor, âThe Plot.â That way madness lies.
Frequently, sequels try to speak to two audiences at once: readers in the know and readers who don't have a clue about what transpired in the prior book. Korelitz isn't interested in being accommodating to the uninitiated. Her suspense novels - which also include âYou Should Have Knownâ (2014), later made into the HBO miniseries âThe Undoingâ - are sardonic, knowing and aloof. Consider the blasé titles of âThe Plotâ and âThe Sequelâ: Readers who enter Korelitz's fictional worlds should not expect to be coddled.
âThe Sequelâ opens briskly. It has been 2 ½ years since star author Jacob Finch Bonner's untimely death. His widow - and our amoral antiheroine, Anna Williams-Bonner - has been keeping busy by perfecting the role of literary widow and raking in the royalties from Jacob's last completed novel, a blockbuster called âCrib.â During a wistful onstage interview about Jacob's magnus opus, Anna is asked about her own future and hears herself declare: âActually, I'm thinking about writing a novel.â The ensuing applause and waves of âwarm and fuzzy positivityâ from the audience prompt Anna to consider that perhaps she's hit on a lucrative idea. With a little help from her late husband's agent, Anna soon finds herself nestled into a cushy writing retreat in New England, churning out a debut novel called âThe Afterword.â
As in âThe Plotâ - along with her earlier academic satires âAdmissionâ (2009) and âThe Devil and Websterâ (2017) - Korelitz's leery view of intellectual posturing and the professionalization of the writing life brings out some of her own best writing. Here's how Anna mordantly regards her breast-beating colleagues at the retreat:
âFirst of all, it wasn't even that hard. The way they went on, all those writers, so incessantly, so dramatically, they might have been going down the mines on all fours with a plastic spoon clenched between their teeth to loosen the diamonds, or wading in raw sewage to find the leak in the septic line. ⦠But this degree of whining over the mere act of sitting down at a desk, or even reclining on a sofa, and ⦠typing?â
Anna's writing career soars according to her well-wrought plans until all the loose ends that were tightly and ingeniously tied up by the end of âThe Plotâ turn out to be bound by mere slip knots. A creepy Post-it note at a book signing followed by an anonymous threatening package alerts Anna to the fact that the veiled accusations of plagiarism weren't laid to rest along with Jacob.
To find - and silence - the potential snitch, Anna, like some unholy pilgrim, revisits all the locales familiar to readers of âThe Plotâ: her grim childhood house in Vermont, the neighborhood in Athens, Ga., where she masqueraded as an undergraduate, the rural campground and cemetery where the unthinkable happened, and the now-shuttered Ripley College where Jacob taught.
As I think happened to most of us readers of âThe Plot,â readers of âThe Sequelâ will find themselves rooting for the witty, ruthless Anna to win out over the predators, poseurs and ordinary mean folk who populate her mostly fallen universe. Like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley (inspiration for Ripley College) or Satan in Milton's âParadise Lost,â Anna is a heinous devil who may shock and offend, but never bores.
In a conversation at opening of âThe Sequel,â Anna and Jacob's literary agent, Matilda, talks over the idea of Anna writing a sequel to âCrib.â Matilda says:
âSequels can be very enticing when the initial book has done well. Readers want to know what happens to a character they've connected with.â
How cheeky of Korelitz to preempt my own response to âThe Sequel,â which is âat least ⦠as goodâ as âThe Plot.â The only question remaining at the end of this droll, cunning suspense novel is: Can âThe Threequelâ be on the horizon?
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Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program âFresh Air,â teaches literature at Georgetown University.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Washington Post
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Corrigan, Maureen. "âThe Sequel' is the perfect suspense tale for Patricia Highsmith fans." Washington Post, 1 Oct. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810807043/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2b1c1714. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "wicked entertainment."
Korelitz, Jean Hanff THE SEQUEL Celadon Books (Fiction None) $29.00 10, 1 ISBN: 9781250875471
A less-than-grief-stricken widow follows in her novelist husband's bestselling footsteps but finds that someone knows more about her than is safe--for either of them.
Anna Williams-Bonner has no burning literary vocation, and she certainly has no need to bury herself in work to recover from her spouse's tragic supposed suicide. But an idle remark while she's on the road promoting Jacob Finch Bonner's posthumously published final work prompts her powerhouse agent--the one she inherited along with Jacob's royalty checks--to get her into an artists' colony; Anna, whose years working on a Seattle radio show prepping a lazy boss for author interviews have given her zero respect for the literary world, figures it can't be all that hard to produce autobiographical fiction exploiting her alleged bereavement. Readers ofThe Plot (2021) already know that Anna is not at all what she seems, and this successor volume's deliciously nasty narration (third-person, but from Anna's point of view) creepily depicts the inner life of a perennially aggrieved, viciously vindictive, and alarming resourceful sociopath. At a signing for her novel, a Post-it note stuck inside one copy of the book warns Anna that someone knows about the past she has worked assiduously to bury. Tracking down this threat to her new prosperity and status requires Anna to revisit that past, and as she does readers learn in grim detail about the long trail of misdeeds she's left behind her. One wonderfully ironic plot twist plays on the publishing world's infamous slush piles, unsolicited manuscripts that molder unread for years in editorial offices; another reveals a rare misstep by Anna. A slew of barbed characterizations--there are no good guys here--add to the mean-spirited fun. The conclusion suggests that Korelitz may decide to emulate Patricia Highsmith and keep her antisocial protagonist around for more enjoyably amoral outings.
Wicked entertainment.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Korelitz, Jean Hanff: THE SEQUEL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f6e70c47. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "This book will fly off the shelves."
Korelitz, Jean Hanff. The Sequel. Celadon. (The Book Series, Bk. 2). Oct. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9781250875471. $29. THRILLER
In Korelitz's The Plot, Anna Williams-Bonner murdered her writer husband Jake and made it look like a suicide, all in an attempt to keep him from unearthing her untidy past. She'd murdered her parents and daughter, invented a new life for herself, then killed her brother when he wrote a tell-all novel about her and showed it to his writing teacher, who happened to be Jake. Jake borrowed its plot and wrote it up as his own book, The Crib, which became an instant success. Then Jake started digging into Anna's past, and she had to take care of him too. Now, in Korelitz's follow-up to The Plot, Anna is enjoying life as the widow of her newly famous late husband. She's written a deceitful book about the experience and is on tour promoting it. But someone is refusing to follow the script she's prepared; cryptic notes, pages from her brother's manuscript start showing up around her. What is a respectable woman to do? Anna sets out to find the culprits and remove them and the manuscript from the world forever. Along the way, she kills an innocent person, but that's just a mistake. From then on, the victims get what's due to them. VERDICT The narrative starts slowly but by the end, it steams along. This book will fly off the shelves.--David Keymer
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Keymer, David. "Korelitz, Jean Hanff. The Sequel." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 7, July 2024, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A800536079/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=44de4f60. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.