The Sequel

“Anna frowned, and not just because Matilda’s take bordered on tasteless. In fact, she had had no problem at all with being Jake’s widow. She’d gone to a good deal of trouble in order to be Jake’s widow. But when it came to what she was already thinking of as her own work, she was not sure she wished to be known professionally as Jake’s widow.”

This passage is emblematic of Anna’s broader quest to reinvent her identity and divorce herself from her late husband’s professional image. The author makes it a point to capture the annoyed turmoil of Anna’s private contemplations, using italics and sentence fragments to convey her sense of displeasure at Matilda’s assumptions. The strategic use of understatement in this scene also highlights Anna’s lack of remorse for her violent crimes, for she casually refers to the act of murdering her husband as going “to a good deal of trouble in order to be Jake’s widow.” By juxtaposing Anna’s traumatic background with her cold, calculated perspective, Jean Hanff Korelitz creates an edgy world in which the protagonist becomes a somewhat sympathetic character even as her ruthless desires warp reality itself. Ultimately, to overcome her own past, Anna seeks to reinvent her life with no regard to laws or social boundaries.

“I’ve been covering publishing for the Times for nearly ten years, and I know, from the outside, it can still look like a gentleman’s club out of some Edith Wharton novel. But it’s still a business, and it’s fueled by business decisions. If your agent took this novel out to sell it, that was because she thought it was good enough for her to stand behind. And if your editor bought it, she felt the same. End of story. They might turn out to be right and they might turn out to be wrong, though in your case I strongly suspect the former. But whatever way it goes, you can be absolutely sure you’re not being given, I don’t know… some widows’ courtesy.”

Matilda Salter’s direct tone establishes her ethos as an expert in her field and conveys her authentic desire to welcome Anna into her elite literary circle. In addition to advancing the plot, Korelitz also uses this scene to deliver a sharp critique of the publishing industry, describing it as a “gentleman’s club” to draw attention to its air of exclusivity and its tendency to marginalize female writers and experts in the field. Matilda’s use of specific literary references and industry diction also indirectly supports her level of expertise in the publishing world, and it is clear that Anna, despite her many crimes and manipulations, has managed to find a staunch ally in the industry.

“We both felt this was just a pantheon for writers. I want to congratulate everyone on the panel for their books. We all know—probably many of us in the audience know—just how hard it is to write a novel, and how hard it is to get it published. I know we writers are famously self-critical, but I hope we can take a moment to just feel pride in the fact that we’re here.”

This passage marks a distinct departure from Anna’s earlier reference to “them, the writers” (13), for in this scene, she uses inclusive language to count herself among them, reveling in her accelerating status as a member of the more rarified literary circles. As she dominates this public arena, Anna’s kindly tone is carefully calculated to project a generous public persona. By addressing her audience as fellow writers and commiserating with their struggles to publish, she creates a selfless, respectable façade that contrasts wildly with her earlier disdain for the “idiots” who populate the publishing industry.

“The final copy had no Post-it. She opened the cover to the title page, where people sometimes placed it, erroneously, wasting her time, but there was nothing there. She turned to the next page, the half title page, and there it was, its usual square, its usual yellow. She picked up her Sharpie, but she couldn’t get her eyes to read the words, or rather her brain to process them. Something wasn’t working, or the words themselves were not working, or weren’t getting through. Anna read them again. Then again, but it made no difference. They still made no sense. For Evan Parker, not forgotten, they said.”

In this passage, Korelitz creates an intimate sense of Anna’s inner emotions and monologue, invoking her annoyance when small details, such as the seemingly misplaced Post-it, slow her progress at a mechanical, repetitive task. Caught up as she is in these mundane details, it takes her a moment to realize the broader implications of the malicious note’s message, and Korelitz’s writing style is engineered to mirror Anna’s inner confusion and dismay. The elliptical syntax, generous use of commas, and employment of repetition conveys Anna’s harried state of mind as she frantically struggles to comprehend the evidence of her eyes and adapt to this implicit threat against her current existence.

“She had worked for so long to separate the two circles of the Venn diagram that was her actual life. One of those circles held the few souls who had known or might remember the person called Dianna Parker—a person who had lived her entire, blasted, and resentful life in central Vermont before dying abruptly (and unnaturally) in the north Georgia mountains.”

The use of figurative language in this passage captures Anna’s innately inventive tendencies and her artistic thought patterns, for just as she is now building a life based upon fiction, she also displays a tendency to see herself as a protagonist in two entirely separate stories, and the character named “Dianna Parker” must have no connections to the character named “Anna.” By dividing her life into a Venn diagram, Anna compartmentalizes her past and her present in two distinct spheres, and any hint of “overlap” therefore becomes a threat to her current endeavors. By condemning “Dianna’s” life as “blasted” and “resentful,” she conveys her deep loathing for the traumas of her upbringing and makes it clear that she wants no association with her former identity.

“No, these pages were not meant to exist. Not today. Not in any format, let alone this one—an apparent photocopy of the original manuscript. She had personally extracted that manuscript, eradicated it, expunged it, eliminated it, or so she’d had every right to believe; and yet these pages in her hands were undeniable. Unkillable. Unlike their author, who had been—in corporal terms, at least—eminently killable.”

In this passage, Anna’s syntax and diction invoke multiple denials of the threat that so unsettles her, as if by repeatedly saying “No!” in various forms, she can undo the danger represented by the mysteriously appearing manuscript pages. The short, sharp phrases in this passage are designed to capture Anna’s desperate state of mind, and the alliterative violence of the verbs “eradicated,” “expunged,” and “eliminated” strike up a staccato rhythm whose very repetition ironically negates the truth of the statement. Clearly, nothing has been eradicated or expunged, and Anna’s worried, harried tone—combined with her casually remorseless reference to her past murder—indicates that her only concern in life is to preserve her current public image.

“Had he really drunk that particular Kool-Aid? Meaning… that he actually was doing the bona fide work of writing? And if so, just what had so inspired him to sit his ass down and get those actual words onto that actual page? Was it possible that his newfound work ethic, and his ability to transcend writer’s block, might somehow result in a completed and indeed publishable… book? And more disturbing even than that, was there any chance, any chance at all, that the life-changing inspiration that had sent him to Ripley and was keeping him productive and inspired up there in West Rutland, Vermont, had something, had anything at all to do with her?”

In this passage detailing events that occurred well before the novel’s beginning, a younger Anna finds herself enraged by the idea that her abusive, bullying brother Evan now has literary aspirations and may be using aspects of her past life and trauma to accomplish his goals. Her contemptuous references to her brother in this passage hint at the true extent of her loathing for him, and she cannot reconcile with the reality that her brother is suddenly identifying as a writer. The succession of incredulous and hyperbolic questions in this passage captures the depth of her outrage and contextualize her drastic efforts to silence him.

“She was irritated now. She was finding, as always, that it was more than a little annoying to talk about Jake. Still, talking about Jake was what she was here to do, and what this monthly ritual had always been about: to keep them close, to learn right away if they were changing toward her, if they had learned some surprising thing that might have altered their view of their cherished son’s cherished wife. Anna was more than ready to stop lamenting about Jake now; she also wanted to stop talking about Ripley, and thinking about Ripley, but it was already too late for that.”

The complex syntax of this passage captures Anna’s weariness over the pragmatic requirements of maintaining her façade as Jake’s grieving widow. When she sarcastically refers to herself as her in-laws’ “cherished son’s cherished wife,” she implicitly draws attention to the fact that the environment of emotional closeness is an illusion. She feels no affection for her in-laws, and any affection they show to her merely fuels her contempt for their lack of discernment—even though her entire reason for meeting with them is to ensure that her disguise remains intact. On another level, Anna’s sense of claustrophobia in the presence of her in-laws conveys her feelings of entrapment, and she resents being shackled to the remnants of her late husband’s identity.

“Still, he supposed there were more awful ways to die, and as much as he missed his parents, he was kind of grateful that neither of them had had to mourn the other one. At first, he intended to move back into the house, but just a few nights there before and after their parents’ funeral were enough to make him reconsider. The baby cried all the time, making it impossible for him to rest, and Diandra made it as obvious as she could that he wasn’t welcome. He took a few things that had belonged to their parents, for sentimental reasons, and left. And it would be many years before he returned to live there again.”

This passage is taken from Evan Parker’s manuscript, in which he describes Anna’s past life in such a way that his disdain for his sister and his feelings of bitterness toward her become imminently clear. His syntax and diction evoke a self-pitying tone that is designed to cast him as the victim and his sister as the villain, without delving into the full nuances of this past history. By emphasizing his role as the grieving son of deceased parents, he casts his sister in an unflattering light, and it is clear that the existence of his manuscript represents a threat to Anna’s current public status and literary endeavors.

“Well, this was both good and deeply unsurprising. She had never really understood this hunger of writers to be seen between the covers of a book. Obviously, a crucial part of making art was presenting it, somehow, to the world, but she herself had never experienced such extravagant hunger for publication. Even during the months when she was writing her own novel, first at the artists’ colony in New England and later in this very apartment, she hadn’t obsessed about what would become of it; she’d simply tried to focus on the actual making of the book, which seemed to her the only part of the endeavor that she could control.”

Even when discussing her own literary endeavors, Anna cannot help but emphasize that her actions and choices focus on her underlying need for control. She prides herself on refraining from the “extravagant hunger for publication” that other writers demonstrate, and although such a philosophy might be attributed to a well-adjusted person who is not concerned with public image, this is not true of Anna. Ironically, her entire focus throughout the novel is on curating her public image and directing her own narrative. She therefore wants to negate the existence of Evan’s manuscript and to establish herself as an individual and a uniquely driven artist.

“His loss had been shocking, devastating, and—although not in the same category as her own, they assured her—deeply personal. And yet, in this generous and caring offer of publication, Jake’s great spirit was being so appropriately honored! And if their own humble submission to such a book were to be accepted, they would feel they were able to acknowledge, in some tiny way, their own great debt to this amazing lost man. Blah, blah, blah.”

This passage dramatizes Anna’s emotional landscape as she reads through anthology submissions and expresses her disdain for the querying artists. The passage affects a melodramatic tone to convey the almost cartoonish earnestness of the submissions, and Korelitz uses excessive punctuation and hyperbolic descriptions to convey Anna’s sarcasm as she reads the gushing sentiment that “Jake’s great spirit was being so appropriately honored!” If any doubt remains over Anna’s perspective on the matter, her dismissive “blah, blah, blah” punctuates her annoyance.

“That was the thing about a private experience. You could speculate all you wanted. You could fictionalize. You could assume. And Evan had done every one of those things, repeatedly. But you couldn’t know for sure.”

The use of the second person in this passage illustrates Anna’s desire to distance herself from her past, and on a broader level, she has already divided her life into different eras by donning and discarding various identities to suit her immediate needs. Because she is referencing an intensely personal experience in this passage, her use of the second person captures her separation from her past identity and her desire to escape the repercussions for the crimes she’s alluding to.

“She might be better off in some small city where people didn’t obsess about books and the writers who wrote them, somewhere not entirely devoid of culture, with pretty neighborhoods full of people who understood the importance of not intruding. Maybe somewhere in a flyover state that people like her late husband hadn’t yet colonized. Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Lawrence, Kansas. Red Wing, Minnesota. They were out there, towns or small cities she might live in comfortably, and perhaps even—if she felt like it—continue the ‘work’ her editor was evidently hoping for. But also: be left alone.”

The use of the conditional tense in this passage emphasizes Anna’s momentary focus on hypothetical futures, and her fatigue over the effort of maintaining her illusory public image is finally beginning to show. By expressing her longing for a small town in which she can “be left alone,” she indirectly acknowledges the strain of projecting her current façade. Rather than seeking more acclaim as a writer, she ironically wishes for a world with less direct attention. Additionally, her ongoing resentment toward her late husband becomes evident when she fantasizes about moving somewhere that people like Jake “hadn’t yet colonized.” By invoking the arrogance of colonialism in this context, she portrays the presence of influential men as an invasion of an otherwise peaceful landscape, and the overall tone of the passage also captures her desire to escape her current restrictions.

“‘I’m talking about the student who died,’ said Martin. He had lifted his half-empty wineglass and was rubbing it nervously between his palms. Damp palms, Anna saw. The moisture, imprinting and smearing on the glass, made her stomach turn. Or perhaps that was simply Evan, finally entering the conversation. He was certainly present.”

By focusing on minute details of body language and appearance during this tense exchange, Korelitz illustrates Anna’s fear and discomfort, as well as her constant fixation on the ghosts of her past. The visceral descriptions of Martin’s “damp palms” and Anna’s queasy stomach create the impression that every moment of this interaction bears heightened significance. As Anna’s anxiety intensifies, the author implicitly draws attention to the protagonist’s ulterior motives, for Martin’s connection to Evan emphasizes Anna’s suspicion that Martin sent her the notes and manuscript excerpts. In her eyes, he is the enemy, and every aspect of his appearance and body language gains ominous significance amidst her growing conviction that he is the culprit. The uneasiness of the scene also foreshadows the violence to come.

“‘I was supposed to write books that didn’t get published. I was supposed to get an MFA from some crappy place like Ripley, am I right? But I didn’t. I just married a writer and when he died, I got his agent. And his publisher, too,’ she said, as if she’d just remembered this part. ‘That’s the long and short of it, right? That’s why you’re so pissed at me.’”

Anna frankly expresses her anger and frustration in this passage through the use of sarcastic rhetorical questions and an oversimplified description of her own literary success. Convinced that Martin is the one who has been sending her threatening notes and fragments of manuscript, Anna now confronts him for what he has allegedly done to her and thus uses clipped, direct language to affect a knowledgeable and intimidating tone.

“Really, she had never been a person who imposed herself on the lives of others. Anything she had ever felt, everything she had ever done, was in response to some unprompted aggression against herself, and how much better the world would be if everyone could show some fraction of her own restraint when it came to other people. Live your life, leave everyone else alone, and stick to your own story… that was the key to personal and communal happiness, wasn’t it? It was just too bad that this succession of men had taken it upon themselves to violate her space, when all she had ever asked for was the peace that anyone deserved.”

This passage emphasizes Anna’s status as a deeply unreliable narrator. Although she has endured intense trauma and suffering in her past and has firmly held reasons for her actions, she has also used these experiences to justify an array of violent acts, and her self-serving and almost whiny tone in this scene is designed to strike a deeply ironic note. When lamenting “how much better the world would be if everyone could show some fraction of her own restraint when it came to other people,” her position becomes almost disingenuous. Korelitz’s wording thus illustrates the more satirical aspects of her approach to the suspense-thriller genre.

“Anna was calculating, furiously. Purcell had been dead since November. Now it was March. Could he have put this excerpt in the mail just before his sudden and certainly unanticipated demise? Of course! It was a coda—that was all. A coda of Martin Purcell’s harassment, of a piece with what had come before. Okay, she thought. Final point to you, Martin. Well played! And yet, Purcell remained precisely as dead as he had been before tonight. It was still just as over as it had been yesterday. Albeit with more mess.”

This passage outlines Anna’s frantic internal response to the realization that she may have miscalculated by murdering Purcell, for the mysterious manuscript excerpts continue to arrive. Rather than immediately admitting her mistake, however, Anna desperately tries to conceive of a scenario in which Martin could still be the culprit, and her thoughts hint at denial and avoidance. By explicitly asserting that the matter “was still just as over,” Anna consciously refuses to accept the idea that she has failed to eliminate the shadowy threats against her.

“Well, Anna thought, setting the page down. That certainly was fiction. Evan, naturally, had had no idea how Rose actually died, and so he was starting from a clean slate, but it struck her as pathetic that this was the best he could come up with. Really? She knifes her kid in the heart, rolls her into a tarp, and buries her in the backyard? It was boilerplate, all right, and also unwise; people walked through those neighboring woods all the time, especially in the fall, no matter how many No Trespassing signs an absentee landowner might post. They hiked, they hunted, they ran their snowmobiles. You’d have to be an idiot to bury a body so close. And she wasn’t an idiot.”

The use of syntax and diction in this passage enacts Anna’s internal experience after reading Evan’s manuscript pages. She is incensed and disbelieving of his fictionalized account of her past, but her private protestations also highlight her implacable core of ruthlessness. Ironically, she does not take issue with the fact that Evan has depicted her cold-blooded murder of her own daughter—and she shows no remorse on this point whatsoever. Instead, she is furious that he would dare to create such a “boilerplate” description her crime—one that portrays her as “idiotic” and incompetent. As ever, she is concerned about her own image, even within a volume of work that she is determined to deprive of an audience.

“Maybe southern bees are different, she was thinking, but only the first half of that thought made it through all of the synapses it needed to get through in order to be officially received as ‘thought,’ because she still wasn’t sure what she meant when she thought it, and anyway she was falling backward so it mattered less and less what she had or had not meant in formulating that thought, or that half-thought, or however much of a thought it had managed to become before it ended. Unseen hands caught her as she fell, but by then she was too far gone to know that, either.”

The complex and elliptical syntax of this passage grows increasingly tangled as Anna’s mental confusion accelerates in the midst of Pickens’s attack. Because she is so deeply focused upon her own pursuits, the novel’s description of this external assault is conveyed in highly internal terms. Rather than establishing the physical aspects of the scene, Korelitz only focuses upon Anna’s reaction and rapidly deteriorating mental state as she descends into unconsciousness. The text therefore mirrors the protagonist’s disorientation in an attempt to add suspense to the narrative.

“It was getting dark. It had to be the same day. She hadn’t spent more than half an hour at Pickens’s house. Had it been plain bad luck? A fluctuation in his routine? Or had he somehow been alerted to the fact that she was here in Athens, and planning her own raid on his home and life? Had he, in fact, been waiting for her? Expecting her to turn up? And if so, how long had he been waiting? Since mailing his letter to Wendy at Macmillan? Or even longer, since the excerpts he’d sent to Jake’s parents and to herself?”

The accumulation of questions in this passage reflects Anna’s desperate desire to make sense of Pickens’s motivations. The tone of her thoughts in this scene contrasts sharply with the element of superiority she displays when reveling in the success of her public image. Faced with the realization that someone has gotten the better of her, she finds herself frantically reviewing recent events, trying to determine where she made a misstep. The resulting tone is worried, edgy, and uncertain.

“The bald fact was this: no one else was here with them, and no one else was coming. She was alone with a profoundly untrustworthy man, who was armed, in the dark, at the edge of a cemetery deep in the north Georgia woods. She was, in other words, on her own. Which was all she had ever been.”

Anna’s plight in this scene renders her a more sympathetic character, and as she starkly reviews the details of her predicament and realizes that no one in the world will help her to escape, her bleak thoughts reflect the isolation of a lifetime. Yet even within the hopeless tone of her contemplations, a vestige of iron resolve remains, and the passage implies that she will do what she can to ensure her own survival, just as she has always done when faced with obstacles or threats.

“(The thought of it came with a jolt of relief, that her trip to Ripley might not have been a waste of her time, her effort, and not incidentally the risk to herself. But wanting that to be true—and she did want very, very much for it to be true—did not, alas, make it true. And if it wasn’t true, and if it hadn’t been Purcell, and if it also hadn’t been Pickens, then she was still in a very bad place. A place even worse, in fact, than waist-deep in her daughter’s grave in backwoods Georgia.)”

Although Anna continues to take decisive steps to ensure her own survival and quell the threat that Pickens represents, her uncertainty over her broader situation dominates her thoughts, revealing the different levels of her calculations. Even as she finds herself mired in an impossible situation, she ponders the bigger picture, and her overarching need to control her own narrative transcends even the life-threatening situation that she endures in Georgia.

“She had never thought she’d need to see it again. But then, she had never thought she would have to come back after the last time, not to this house and certainly not to this room. And yet here she was and here it was, right where she’d left it: the indestructible bed of her ancestors. It had outlived them, and her parents who had died in it, and the brother who had died in it, and the daughter who had been conceived in it. It will outlive me, too, Anna thought. Whatever happens to me, this bed will last forever, as all evil things are wont to do.”

Anna’s trauma-driven despair at the sight of her parents’ old bed conveys the unplumbed depths of her unprocessed issues. As she fixates upon the idea that the bed—the scene of many violent events—is “indestructible” and has “outlived” all the antagonists whom she has managed to kill, her harried thoughts imply that there are some aspects of her past that she will never truly escape. The phrases “not to this house” and “not to this room” underscore Anna’s resistance to reconciling with her childhood home and experiences. By characterizing the bed itself as an “evil thing” that will “last forever,” Anna indirectly suggests that her own personal demons are just as immortal as the odious piece of furniture in front of her.