The Plot

Excerpts from Jake’s novel Crib develop alongside Jake’s exploration of the true events behind his novel. Some of the parallels turn out to be eerily accurate. In one section of Crib, Jake writes that Samantha “wanted an abortion [...] but there was an unfortunate complication, namely that her mother and father were Christians [...] the Hell-has-a-special-waiting-room-for-you kind. Also, the laws of the state of New York gave them veto power over Samantha” (133). As he lay dying, Anna tells Jake that, like Samantha, she had “Zero chance of an abortion. Zero support for giving the baby up for adoption, either. You were spot-on with all that, actually, the way you wrote it. That’s absolutely what it was like for me.” (307). This section shows how fiction can resemble fact.

However, Jake cannot imagine that a mother could murder her daughter with premeditation. Jake writes Samantha killing Maria accidentally, in the heat of a fight, categorizing it a crime of passion. In real life, Dianna planned each of her murders. As Jake is dying, Anna asks, “And that’s where the dividing line is? [...] Between something any of us might do under the circumstances and something only a truly evil person would do? Planning it?” (301).

The Plot wants the juxtaposition of Anna’s and Samantha’s stories to read like an expose of the flaws of fiction, illustrating that “Truth being stranger than fiction was, itself, a truth universally acknowledged” (286). However, since the entire novel, not just the novel-within-a-novel, is fiction, it’s unclear whether Jake’s failure of the imagination is truly a blind spot of the form, or just his own inability to connect with others.