The Plot

Jake, a failed writer who steals a talented student’s idea for a novel, is self-centered and obsessed with his authorial status. His sole ambition is to be a successful author: “All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him” (56). However, external measures of success do not cure Jake’s self-loathing; he is “not happy with himself […] always, not just during the long years of professional failure but during the past two years of dizzying success, in which he had merely traded one form of dread and self-castigation for another” (163). Jake trades clinging to jealousy of more successful writers for obsessing over fears that his stealing Evan’s plot for his novel will be exposed.

Jake fears make him passive and avoidant even when threatened: “At the end of the day he couldn’t bring himself to do anything at all: direct, indirect, or even just evasive” (138). His constant checking of the internet for Talented Tom’s missives makes him feel like an “obsessive-compulsive at the mercy of his cleaning rituals” (140). However, even when Jake takes an active role, doing research about Evan and his family to determine Talented Tom’s identity, his obliviousness and lack of imagination make fail as a detective. He is blinded by his “sheer rage [...] the deep resentment against this person who felt it her business and her right to harry and persecute him, just because he’d found a story and crafted it into a fine and compelling narrative” (254).

Jake’s obsession with his writerly skills becomes his undoing. After ingesting Anna’s cocktail of lethal drugs, Jake no longer has language: Anna is the one who provides the explicative mystery denouement, robbing Jake of his role in the narrative. Anna then writes a fake suicide note putting in Jake’s mouth “Sentences: his last, and not even chosen by him, or arranged by him, or vetted by him. It was nearly the worst thing of all” (315). Not only does Jake lose his life, but he also loses access to immortality on the page.