“Sequels can be very enticing when the initial book has done well,” says a literary agent early on in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Sequel. The novel’s antiheroine, Anna Williams-Bonner, replies with characteristic pragmatism: “But they’re never as good as the first book, are they?” There follows a long pause as each of them tries and fails to find an example of a successful sequel; it’s typical of Korelitz’s wry humour that the only one they can name is the ultimate disaster follow-up – that of Harper Lee.
The Sequel is the sequel to Korelitz’s hit literary thriller The Plot, which concerned a failing writer, Jacob Finch Bonner, who stole the plot of one of his students’ works in progress and spun it into a bestseller, only to find himself the target of anonymous online attacks from someone who appears to know about his crime. The Sequel tells the story of his wife, Anna, now a writer herself and the recipient of similar threats of exposure. Since Anna has plenty of secrets she would prefer to keep buried, she grows increasingly determined to discover her persecutor and silence them.
Like its predecessor, The Sequel is a novel about stories; an on-the-nose satire about the cut-throat publishing industry, and a Chinese puzzle of books-within-books and deliberately placed literary references for the cognoscenti. Not for nothing is Jake’s now defunct educational establishment called Ripley College (there’s more than a hint of Highsmith’s Tom Ripley in Anna), and the media’s treatment of Anna as the wife of a famous literary man rather than a talent in her own right is depicted with sharp relish (Korelitz is married to Pulitzer prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon).
There is, of course, a twist, satisfyingly executed, and the author’s skewering of the feuds and resentments of the publishing industry are enormously entertaining, though perhaps funnier for insiders than the general reader. Anyone embarking on this novel without having read The Plot may find themselves overloaded with layered plotlines and multiple identities at the beginning, but in this witty and tightly plotted follow-up, Korelitz has happily proved her own protagonist wrong about sequels.