Excerpt from The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Just as well, because it wasn't about anything, and it wasn't coming along at all, and they shouldn't expect to see it ever … because it didn't exist. There was, as Gertrude Stein had once so famously said, no there there, and yet the mere notion of this mythical novel had carried her out of a grueling and drawn-out year of literary appearances on waves of applause. And not—it was worth noting—applause for Jake and his tragic mental health struggles or rumored persecution (probably at the hands of some jealous failed writer!), and not applause for his sad posthumous novel, either. Applause for her.

It was not in her nature to be troubled by an instance of such mild subterfuge, and she was not troubled by it, but she did wonder if there might be a horizon for all of this warm and fuzzy positivity. Was there some ticking clock out there, already set to expire when she mentioned her fictional(!) novel for the twentieth time, or the fiftieth, or the hundredth? Would some future interviewer, revisiting the tragic story of Jacob Finch Bonner and the success he barely got to enjoy after so much hard work, finally ask his widow whatever happened to the novel she herself was supposedly writing?

No one would, she suspected. Even if her vague ideation lingered in someone's memory or newspaper profile, wouldn't everyone just assume that the nonappearance of said aspirational fiction must mean that she, like so many others, had fallen short when it came to actually getting the thing onto the page? Yes, even she, the widow of such a talented writer, with all she must have learned from him, and with her very public fiction-inspiring personal tragedy—the spouse of a suicidal writer!—had simply failed to produce a good enough novel, or any novel at all. That was precisely what happened to so many people who tried to do so many things, wasn't it? A person says they're going to lose ten pounds or quit smoking or write that novel, and yet you spy them sneaking a cigarette out by the dumpster, or—if anything—bigger than they were before! And you simply think: Uh-huh. And that's the end of it. No one ever actually confronts that person who fails to do that thing they were almost certainly never going to get done. No one actually ever says: So, what happened to that plan of yours?

Besides, who really needed her to write a novel? The world was jammed full of people supposedly writing their novels. Jake was assailed at every appearance by people who were writing them, or said they were writing them, or wanted to one day be writing them, or would be writing them if only they had the time or the childcare or the supportive parents or the spouse who believed in them or the room-of-one's-own, or if some awful relative or ex-spouse or former colleague were dead already and no longer alive to disapprove of a book that would sorta kinda be based on them and might even sue its author! And those were just the people who weren't even getting the words onto the pages; what about the ones who were? How many, at this very moment, were in fact actually writing their novels, and talking (annoyingly) about writing their novels, and complaining (even more annoyingly) about writing their novels? So many! But how many of those novels would actually get to the finish line? How many of the ones that did would be any good? How many of the ones that were any good would find agents, and how many of the ones with agents would get publishers? Then, how many of the ones that got published would ever even come to the attention of that precious slice of the human population who actually read novels? Sometimes, when she was in bookstores, tending to the business of being Jake's widow and executor (and heir), she would stop in front of the New Fiction section and just gape at all of them, that week's new publications enjoying their brief moment in the limelight. Each of them was a work that had been completed, revised, submitted, sold, edited, designed, produced as a finished book, and brought to the reading public. Some of them, she suspected, were better than others. A few might actually be good enough to have earned the grudging approval (perhaps even envy) of her late husband, who knew a well-written and well-crafted work of fiction when he encountered one. But which among these many were those few? She certainly didn't have the time to find out. Or, to be frank, the inclination.

Excerpted from The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Copyright © 2024 by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Excerpted by permission of Celadon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.