" Anyone who has ever taken a writing class will recognize Evan Parker's braggadocio, the student who believes he has already outrun the teacher, the classmate who has nothing to share. He's so much a creature of his own imagination that even his middle name is an invention, taken in homage to his favorite novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.īut for Evan Parker, Ripley offers an open door, a way for him to use a big, shocking idea as premise for a debut novel that Parker claims ". Ripley, located in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, is a waystation for Bonner, whose early success as a novelist has dried up and left him searching for places where he can simultaneously disappear from the powerful literati while maintaining the fiction that he's working on something new. These two cishet white male writers have brief literary fisticuffs during a class held for one Ripley College's low-residency MFA program. Of all the things to enjoy in Jean Hanff Korelitz's new mystery novel The Plot, one of the best has to be one of the earliest, which is the encounter between Jacob Finch Bonner and his student Evan Parker (who intends his nom de plume to be "Parker Evan").
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