“Take Jean Hanff Korelitz’s runaway 2021 best seller “The Plot” (destined to become a series on Hulu). The title and cover image (a mise en abyme illustration of a book titled “The Plot”) clue us in to what awaits inside: a book not just about a book but about something more fundamental — the essence of plot itself. Korelitz cleverly wraps her metafiction in a page-turner: the story of Jake, a writer once successful, now blocked, who makes good when Evan, a former student, dies and Jake helps himself to Evan’s plot (though not his prose), only to be harassed by a mysterious source threatening to expose him as a thief.

At the same time, Korelitz constantly foregrounds the idea of fiction’s intrinsic indebtedness. “Was there even such a thing as ‘a plot like mine’?” Jake reflects early on, after meeting with Evan, who utters this phrase, boasting that his work in progress is “a sure thing” — one that, owing entirely to the novelty of its plot, will make its author rich, become an Oprah pick and wind up a Hollywood blockbuster.

Jake knows better. After all, “greater minds” than his “had identified the few essential plots along which pretty much every story unfurled itself.” Yet when Evan confides his novel’s plot, Jake, rendered speechless, is forced to revise his opinion: “He had no thought of anything but this story, which was none of the great plots — Rags to Riches, Quest, Voyage and Return, Rebirth. … It was something new to him, as it would be new to every single person who read it, and that was going to be a lot of people.”

This is the irony at the heart of “The Plot”: What is greeted by Jake, and eventually by his dazzled reading public, as shockingly new is inexorably shown to have been (depending on your view) reimagined or stolen, not just by Jake but, under different circumstances (read the book to grasp this twist), by Evan, too. Korelitz has ingenious fun with what by her conclusion begins to feel like an infinite regress of appropriations and remakings: Jake’s own novel is called, pointedly, “Crib”; a central character is revealed to have borrowed a back story for herself from the plot of Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping”; and the literary allusions — from Percy Bysshe Shelley and T.S. Eliot to Patricia Highsmith — giddily pile up.

Ultimately, Korelitz’s point is more philosophical than moral: However hard we try to police the boundaries of storytelling, by instilling codes of ethics and enforcing copyright law, stories, by their very nature, want to be free — free to circulate through us and among us, undergoing revision and transformation in an endlessly generative and unstoppable process.

As if to prove her thesis, Korelitz has given “The Plot” a sequel. Published in October and titled (what else?) “The Sequel,” it, too, features a mise en abyme cover, only here the illustration shows the new book perched atop a prone copy of its predecessor, as though supplanting it — which “The Sequel,” or at least its protagonist, tries to do. This time, the efforts to patrol storytelling take a decidedly grisly turn. But though the body count climbs, a reader is unlikely to come away convinced that the trail of muzzled voices means that order has been restored, or to share the killer’s view that control over the tale at these novels’ center has been returned to its rightful owner. Korelitz has taught her lesson well: Censoring a storyteller is unlikely to stop the dissemination of the story — it’s already out there...”