Jean Hanff Korelitz: ‘Life’s too short without plot twists’

Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of eight novels including 2014′s You Should Have Known, which TV viewers will know as the Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman whodunit The Undoing, has only just begun to chat to me on Zoom when she breaks off to introduce her son, Asher Muldoon.

The 23 year old is about to leave the family’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for a rehearsal of The Butcher Boy, his musical adaptation of Pat McCabe’s feverishly imaginative 1992 novel. The production is set to run at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre from July until September, and his mother is beyond thrilled and proud; as he leaves, dressed for summer in shorts, she reminds him he’ll need long trousers for an evening engagement. Immediately, then, it’s clear that her home life – her husband is the poet Paul Muldoon, and alongside Asher the couple have a daughter, Dorothy, plus dog and an elderly cat called Peter, who’s beginning to have trouble locating the litter tray – is a world away from the one portrayed in her new novel, The Latecomer.

At its centre is Johanna, a woman who is delighted when the still nascent miracle of IVF eventually produces triplets; this, she believes, will finally fulfil not only her, but her husband Salo, whose young adulthood has been blighted by his involvement in a tragic accident. But nothing could have prepared her for the indifference, verging on antipathy, that her children feel for one another and, on occasion, their parents. Will a fourth child, years later, bring the family together, or is it far too late? Into this fraught family dynamic, Korelitz introduces numerous digressions: the reader encounters, among other things, the art-collecting world of the late 20th century, the changing face of Brooklyn, educational settings both progressive and reactionary, the tragedy of obsessive hoarding and the ramifications of long-secreted adultery.

There’s even a brief nod to the fascinating phenomenon of plagiarism, which powered her last novel, The Plot. And the two books are intimately connected, for it was while Korelitz was struggling with The Latecomer – a sprawling, multigenerational novel with such strong lead characters that the reader is unsure, for a long time, who precisely is its narrator – that she came up with the idea for a completely different book. “Pick your metaphor,” she tells me now. “I was lost in the forest, I was wandering around, I boxed myself into a corner more than once. And the book got longer and longer without really getting better.” At her publishing house, her editor had moved on, and when she submitted an early draft of The Latecomer to their replacement, a devastating message came back: “‘Not even close.’”

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Embryonic idea

That must have been awful moment, I say. “It really was quite terrible. And, you know, this publisher had done three of my books, I had a big HBO show coming out, and I remember thinking when I got that message, they must have hated it so much.” Korelitz and her agent then took the manuscript to her former editor in her new post, who more encouragingly thought that it would get there but that it still needed a lot of work. (“If I tell you that there was a version of this novel in which the Oppenheimer triplets and their parents are on a boat going around the world...” Korelitz tells me to indicate how much this resolutely land-based book has changed.) A back and forth ensued until the months before the pandemic, when Korelitz began to pay attention to what was happening in China. “I’m a very fearful person; there’s no point in denying it. Fear first, always,” she explains. By the time she met with her editor in January 2020, she was exhausted and frustrated and – by the sound of it, without really meaning to – she began talking about an embryonic idea about “a failed writer who has this awful student and the student has this brilliant idea, and then the student dies”.

Write that, said her editor and, over a period of four months, with nothing to do but “be scared, be angry, and write all the time”, she did. Her husband was working on his edition of Paul McCartney’s lyrics, she was writing The Plot and in the evenings, having never enjoyed television together before (she loves it; he does not), they watched The Sopranos.

With The Plot done in record time, she returned to The Latecomer and found that she was no longer “in the weeds”; rather, she figured out its problems – chiefly that she hadn’t identified, among all its rich cast, whose story she really wanted to tell – and, although she says it remains the hardest of all her books to have written, she finished it. The result is an immersive tragicomedy, with all manner of unexpected twists and turns, that put me in mind of the work of writers such as Meg Wolitzer and Ann Patchett.

It’s a strikingly different novel from her previous work, but then Korelitz appears to relish changing tack; she has written legal thrillers, a novel inspired by Der Rosenkavalier and one by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Admission, a campus romance that was made into a film of the same name starring Tina Fey. She seems to me to be interested in experimenting with different devices, different ingenious ways to construct stories, and she explains that, as a student at Cambridge in the 1980s – “my brief and stunted academic life”, she laughs – her specialism was 18th-century fiction, the picaresque world of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson.

Family saga

“I was on Team Fielding rather than Team Richardson,” she insists. “And of course, all of those early women who were obscure until the 20th century, Charlotte Lennox and Maria Edgeworth. I love them. And I guess you can hear the echoes of those big meaty novels in The Latecomer. But to write any kind of a novel without a plot twist is just – why bother? Life’s too short without plot twists.” The other novel she kept in mind during the writing of this family saga was John Irving’s The World According to Garp, “a devastating book, and yet the sweetness and the sense of fulfilment, and synergy and completion and perfection, my God to be able to write something like that! To be able to write a book that makes people sigh!”

The last couple of years were not all about creating new fiction. How did it feel, I ask her, to have a global TV smash on her hands when The Undoing came out? “To have a huge HBO hit in the middle of a pandemic is the best way to have it, I think,” she replies, “because you’re totally anaesthetised, you have no sense of what’s going on out there in the world.” She had, in fact, nothing to do with the production, which was created by David E Kelley and revolves around the murder of a young woman and the ensuing suspicion unleashed between a husband and wife; so different was the HBO version from its source that Korelitz and Muldoon sat down to watch the last episode without knowing how it would resolve.

But the burning question, I suggest, was not whodunit, but what was Nicole Kidman’s character, a psychologist, wearing? Her clothes – a succession of jewel-coloured, opulent boho dresses and coats in luxurious fabrics – were the show’s true centrepiece. She chuckles in agreement. “They set out to make her clothes a character, basically. The minute I saw that green coat, I was like, it’s gonna be all about that coat. You’ve got to be Nicole Kidman to pull off a coat like that. If I wore that coat, it would look like a bathrobe.”

This summer, Korelitz says, is all about going to the Irish Repertory Theatre – an organisation for which she produced a version of James Joyce’s The Dead – to watch Asher’s musical as many times as possible, before she and her husband set out for Ireland, where they’ll spend most of August. They start in Dingle, where they lived many years previously, and then they’ll take Muldoon’s Picnic – his “omnium gatherum” of music, prose and poetry, with special guests including Kevin Barry, Horslips, Nick Laird and Zadie Smith – on the road to Limerick, Letterkenny, Belfast and Dublin. “I’ll be following Paul around,” she jokes. “I’m the groupie-in-chief, so I do things like carry the guitars around and that’s fun. I don’t have to go on stage or, God forbid, sing or play an instrument. Maybe I’ll be the merch girl.”

The Latecomer is published by Faber & Faber on August 4th