Jake, a failed writer who steals a talented student’s idea for a novel, is self-centered and obsessed with his authorial status. His sole ambition is to be a successful author: “All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him” (56). However, external measures of success do not cure Jake’s self-loathing; he is “not happy with himself […] always, not just during the long years of professional failure but during the past two years of dizzying success, in which he had merely traded one form of dread and self-castigation for another” (163). Jake trades clinging to jealousy of more successful writers for obsessing over fears that his stealing Evan’s plot for his novel will be exposed.

Jake fears make him passive and avoidant even when threatened: “At the end of the day he couldn’t bring himself to do anything at all: direct, indirect, or even just evasive” (138). His constant checking of the internet for Talented Tom’s missives makes him feel like an “obsessive-compulsive at the mercy of his cleaning rituals” (140). However, even when Jake takes an active role, doing research about Evan and his family to determine Talented Tom’s identity, his obliviousness and lack of imagination make fail as a detective.