It is almost impossible to resist the urge to provide an analysis of Jean Korelitz’s 2022 novel, The Latecomer, without comparing it to its immediate predecessor published a year earlier, The Plot. Appropriately enough, The Plot is a tightly plotted tale that revolves thematically narratively around the importance of plotting in writing a novel. By contrast, finding a review that describes the plot of The Latecomer is almost as difficult as locating the plot within the novel itself. One almost gets the sense—actually one gets a very strong and definite sense—that the author specifically set out to follow up The Plot with a novel that dispenses with the whole notion of plotting being an essential component in crafting a novel.
Everything about this novel is directed toward the idea that the events and chronology which make up the elements of plotting are of far less significance than the way that a story is told. Storytelling is quite literally the focus of the storytelling of this novel and what gives the elements making up that story its power is primarily the way it is told. For starters, despite this being a novel, it includes a Foreword. While this prefatory material was actually quite common in the early decades of the novel’s history, it definitely qualifies as a rarity. A Foreword is not only much more generally found in non-fiction, but as often as not is written by someone other than the author. Even before the first official chapter, then, The Latecomer is messing around with the very structure of storytelling in a novel.
Once that first official chapter commences, it only takes a couple of pages before a character is referenced in some detail. His name is Joseph Oppenheimer and he is situated as an ancestor of the patriarch of the fictional family at the center of this tale. Except that Joseph Oppenheimer is an actual, semi-legendary historical figure who lived in the 1700s and was later resurrected by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels specifically to the drug through the mud in an orgasmic celebration of antisemitism. Later in the novel, the full details of the backstory of Joseph Oppenheimer, including his return from the dead to fulfill Goebbel’s onanistic filmmaking fetish, will be covered in greater detail. Until then, however, what The Latecomer presents the reader over a span of literally just five minutes worth of reading time is a work of fiction structurally commingling with elements traditionally relegated to the domain of non-fiction.
And this is not even to mention that that Foreword exists for the purpose of introducing siblings as “the Oppenheimer triplets” even though they were “thought of by not a single person who knew them” in that way. As if that weren’t odd enough, these “Oppenheimer triplets” were conceived outside the womb using in vitro fertilization. The final layer of storytelling subversion is that these three test tube babies also completely defy the one conventional expectation placed upon those who come into the world via multiple births. Rather than experiencing a special bond closer than siblings separated by time, these three seem to come into being with the defining purpose of their lives being to get as far away from one another as quickly as possible.
To refer to the author's previous novel, The Plot, one more time, it is worth mentioning that the intricate plotting of the storyline in that novel springs forth from a single philosophical dispute among two characters. A published writer currently teaching creative writing quickly finds himself at odds with one particular student. The student is convinced that plotting is everything in a novel because no amount of great writing can magically make a boring story interesting. The teacher, by contrast, is situated firmly within the philosophical end of the spectrum that literary craftsmanship can transcend a poorly plotted narrative. In other words, if told with enough panache, readers will easily excuse the lack of a cohesive weaving together of incidents linked by conflict, character, and enough craftsmanship to effectively distract the reader from all the contrivances of coincidence necessary to sustain tension.
In telling the story of the three older Oppenheimer children and their much younger sister who is the latecomer to the family, the conflict, character, and contrivances of coincidence are all on display. They just are not seamlessly woven together as a plot. How the characters are linked to each other and the episodic events which make up the narrative are less important than the way in which the characters and those episodic events are presented. This distinction is perhaps made clearer by illuminating one more structural decision which takes the storytelling of this story off the beaten track. While chapter subtitles are not so nearly as strongly associated with non-fiction rather than fiction as a Foreword, the author adds just a little creative oomph to the process that serves to make the decision to give each chapter a subtitle even more essential.
These and the other chapter subtitles are a prime example of what the character in The Plot means with his argument that an elevated style of literary craftsmanship can be enough to satisfy a reader when the plotting is poor or even, as in this case, essentially non-existent. A mere review of these chapter subtitles is more than enough to convince the hesitant reader that stuff happens in this novel. Indeed, an argument is easily made that more “stuff” happens in this plotless novel than happens in many novels with complicated plotting. And that seems to be the message that the author intends to deliver. Having displayed with great flourish the ability to distract readers from the contrivances necessary to create a plot, she displays with an equal flourish the ability to dispense with that need for that distraction by telling a story that is reliant upon the craft of storytelling in its purer form that does not require a plot to maintain reader interest.
