49 pages • 1 hour read
Jean Hanff KorelitzThe Sequel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 9-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “No Longer at Ease”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of rape and murder.
Throughout Anna’s trip back to New York from Denver, she thinks about Evan and the sticky note. Because she killed Evan, she knows he isn’t alive and couldn’t have written the note. However, she can’t imagine who would be behind it. Back at home, she dons a robe, makes herself a drink, and sorts through her fan mail. Then she begins to wonder if the note-writer might be one of Jake’s students. She believes all aspiring and failed writers turn out to be bitter. At the bottom of her mail, she finds a manila envelope containing a manuscript excerpt that resembles the plot line of Crib. In this story, however, the characters are called Diandra and Ruby, which Anna knows are pseudonyms for her and Rose. Reading the pages, Evan comes alive again. She can’t understand who else might know about her past life.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary: “Little Men”
The next morning, Anna goes through the rest of the mailed manuscript. In the story, Diandra lives in her family’s old house. It’s filled with ancient furniture and the walls are stenciled with pineapples. She lives there with her daughter Ruby, whom she had when she was 15. Ruby proved to be smart and driven and made plans to leave home for college.
At the end of the manuscript excerpt, the envelope-sender has written “Seem familiar?” (83). Anna can’t help thinking back to her life in the yellow Vermont house. She knows this is part of Evan’s old manuscript, but she destroyed the pages when she killed him. She was angry because Evan was pretending to know “all about her life” (84). Throughout her childhood, Evan was entitled and a bully. Although he wasn’t a good student, had many affairs, and got multiple girls pregnant, their parents loved him. Anna was later furious when she discovered Evan was pursuing an MFA and claiming authorial skill.
Anna turns over the manuscript pages and remembers her life in Athens, Georgia. She moved here after killing Rose, assuming her identity, and taking her college scholarships. No one looked into Diandra’s alleged death or questioned that she was Rose. Throughout her time in Athens, she kept tabs on Evan. He was studying at Ripley and part of various Facebook writing groups. One day she noticed him posting about the novel he was working on. Shortly thereafter, he showed up in Athens. She became terrified that he might be writing about her life. She drove to West Rutland, went home, found his manuscript, which was indeed about her life, and decided to destroy it and kill him. She poisoned the water in his kettle, which he used to make coffee when he returned home. Once he was weakened, she injected him with drugs she found in the house, capitalizing on his past history of substance abuse and addiction. After he died, she buried him where she buried Rose and went to a motel. She returned to the house the next day and sorted through Evan’s documents, destroying his drafts of the novel.
Anna now wonders if he gave another draft to his Ripley classmates. She decides she’ll do everything she can to discover who is behind this.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary: “Son”
Anna meets up with Jake’s parents Louise and Frank Bonner for their monthly brunch date. Anna doesn’t like the meetings, but tries her best to play her part. Louise and Frank are kind and congratulate her book. Then they reveal they received an excerpt of a manuscript that suggested that Jake plagiarized Crib. Although Anna killed Jake for stealing and publicizing her story in Crib, Jake had been better about disguising her identity than Evan. Anna tries to assuage the Bonners’ worries but decides to travel to Vermont to solve the mystery.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary: “War and Remembrance”
Anna pours some wine and reads the manuscript excerpt the Bonners gave her. The excerpt describes what happened after Diandra got pregnant. Diandra wanted an abortion, but her parents forbade it because she was underage. They also wouldn’t let her give up the baby for adoption. In the manuscript, Evan named his character Ethan. After the Parkers’ died, Ethan wasn’t sure what happened but suspected Diandra. He spent some time living with a friend thereafter, as it was too difficult for him to return to the house. The manuscript ends with another note from the sender.
Anna tries to understand where the pages came from. She fears that if the sender knows she is Evan’s sister, they know she killed him.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary: “Everybody’s Fool”
Anna realizes that Martin Purcell would’ve been “Evan’s most intimate Ripley friend” (121). Jake went to see him not long before his death. He’d gotten his idea for Crib from Evan when he was his student. Evan told him about his story idea and after Evan died, Jake used it to turn his career around. After the book came out, he went to Vermont to contact people in Evan’s life.
Anna emails Martin. She introduces herself and asks to meet up, explaining that she wants to anthologize some of Jake’s former students’ writing in honor of Jake and his teaching career. Martin responds almost immediately but Anna waits to write back. Meanwhile she stews over aspiring and successful writers’ work. She knows the writing world thinks she cheated her way into success because Jake was successful. She also knows offering someone like Martin publication is the ideal bait.
Part 1, Chapter 14 Summary: “One Good Turn”
Anna and Martin finally get in touch on the phone. Shortly thereafter Martin contacts former Ripley students. They soon start querying Anna about being included in the anthology. She reads through the submissions but doesn’t find anyone who she thinks could be targeting her and sending Evan’s manuscript. No one mentions Evan at all in their submissions.
Part 1, Chapter 15 Summary: “Beggarman, Thief”
A month after receiving the anthology submissions, Anna gets another manila envelope with another excerpt of Evan’s manuscript. Like the other envelopes, this one has a Vermont return address.
In the manuscript, Ethan has friends over to the house one night. Diandra repeatedly asks them to be quiet so she can study. Finally, everyone but Ethan and Perry Donovan leave. Ethan tells Perry that Diandra keeps coming into the living room because she has a crush on him. Perry makes advances and Ethan goes to the bed. Afterwards, Diandra and Perry have sex in Ethan and Diandra’s parents’ room so Ethan can hear them. Ethan and Perry never discuss what happened, but when Diandra gets pregnant, everyone knows that Perry is Ruby’s father.
Anna is furious because Evan’s version of the story is wrong. In reality, “Perry” (whose real name is Patrick) raped her. After she discovered she was pregnant, she and Patrick went for a drive. Anna tried killing herself, Patrick, and the baby in a crash, but only Patrick died. Now, she decides that the only person who could be behind the envelopes is Martin, because Evan must have shared his story with Martin at some point. Now she wants to “know for sure” (146).
Part 1, Chapters 9-15 Analysis
The more embroiled Anna becomes in the manuscript mystery, the more her past intrudes upon her present. Anna has yet to figure out who wrote the incriminating sticky note from the book tour before both she and Jake’s parents receive more installments from her late brother’s manuscript. These mysterious manila envelopes are symbolic representations of Anna’s buried past, and thus narrative devices that further unsettle Anna’s curated life and identity in the present. The manuscript excerpts also induce narrative flashbacks on the page. Each time Anna opens an envelope and reads one of the excerpts, she finds herself transported back to her childhood home in West Rutland, Vermont, and thus back into the scenes of her early life. These dynamics further the novel’s explorations concerning The Intersection of the Past and Present. Anna is desperate to hide from the woman she used to be and the life she was once forced to live. However, no matter how hard she tries to run from this past life, it continues to follow her. The novel thus suggests that the individual is never entirely free of her past, particularly when she attempts to deny, manipulate, or erase it before reconciling with it.
The manuscript excerpts also induce formal mutations on the page. In Chapters 9, 10, 12, and 15, Anna’s experience reading the excerpts reorients the novel to an alternate time, space, and storyline. In Chapter 10, for example, Anna “read[s] the whole thing standing in the middle of her living room, holding the pages between thumb and forefinger, as if they might contaminate her” (80). Instead of merely summarizing the pages Anna is reading in this scene, the third-person narrator of Anna’s story presents the exact written pages that Anna is reading. These pages are presented in a series of indented, italicized paragraphs. The Sequel narrative thus assumes a nested structure, presenting one story embedded within the next. This form enacts the novel’s subtextual notions that one’s past is always embedded in her present. Furthermore, this formal technique captures and conveys Anna’s experience in the narrative present as the manuscript indeed transports her out of her New York home and back into her childhood home and life in Vermont. In much the same way, the italicized passages intrude upon Anna’s account and assume center narrative stage.
The more that Anna’s past intrudes upon her life in the present, the more desperate she grows for autonomy over her own story. Indeed, her desperation to resolve who is sending the manuscripts is a symptom of her desperation to claim her own story and to keep others from stealing it. These dynamics further the novel’s ongoing explorations concerning The Ethics of Storytelling. Indeed, through Anna’s experiences, the novel questions who is allowed to tell stories and who these stories inherently belong to. Anna is furious that Jake and Evan have written about her past life, because their stories suggest that they know “all about her life, despite having been so notably absent for most of it” (84). She wants the agency to be able to tell her story the way she experienced it, or even to deny that the trauma experienced occurred at all. In Jake’s and Evan’s fictionalized accounts, Anna loses her agency because her life and character have been manipulated by external parties for egotistical or financial gain.
The disparities between Anna’s memories of her past and Evan’s rendering of her life enact The Tension Between Truth and Fiction. The narrative form mirrors this struggle between Anna’s alleged experience of reality and Evan’s depiction of it. For example, after each italicized manuscript excerpt, the narrator inhabits Anna’s consciousness as she reflects on how her brother has distorted her story. These passages present what Anna believes to be the truth, while Evan’s pages represent what Anna believes to be a bastardized iteration of her life story. However, because Anna is a dichotomous, unreliable character, the conflict between truth and fiction on the page grows. Anna’s version of events is true to her, and because Evan’s version of the truth doesn’t align with her experience, she becomes angry and violent. The novel is thus questioning what makes fiction false and what makes truth real, and who gets to decide the difference between the two.
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By Jean Hanff Korelitz
