My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff

Author:Joanna Rakoff [Rakoff, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95801-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

The next day, Pam dropped on my desk a thick envelope bearing rows of colorful foreign postage. Inside, I found the Other Client’s new novel, his first literary venture in a decade. He was on leave from teaching at the moment, staying with his wife’s family in New Zealand. “I just have a feeling about this,” my boss told Hugh and me, bouncing excitedly on her toes, the thick manuscript clutched to her chest. “This is going to be huge,” she told me the next morning. She’d read the entire thing in one night. “Prepare yourself for a multiple submission.” I nodded, afraid to open my mouth. Multiple submissions, I’d thought, were not the Agency way. But veering from the Agency way could only be a good thing for the Agency.

“It’s going to be a lot of work,” she warned me. Perhaps, I thought, this was her problem with contemporary agenting, or contemporary publishing, in general: not that it was unscrupulous, but that it was too taxing. Thirty years earlier, she could have sold this book on a one-page proposal and a handshake.

For a week, my boss consulted with Max, working and reworking a list of editors to whom she’d send the novel, many of them younger and unknown to her, outside her network of cronies. The manuscript was handed to me to be sent out for xeroxing—our office machine couldn’t handle twelve copies of a three-hundred-page tome—and while I waited for the messenger to arrive, I peeked at the front page. I’d been relieved, honestly, that my boss hadn’t asked me to read the novel. It sounded gruesome and sensational and vaguely misogynist, the sort of violent thriller sold in airports. The first pages showed this to be absolutely true. The narrator excruciatingly details a Grand Guignol scene in which he finds the bodies of three dead girls in an attic, arranged in a sort of diorama. The writing, sure, was elegant and precise, the tone controlled and engaging—almost masterful—but there was still something about those pages—something beyond the grotesque subject matter—that turned my stomach.

In the end, my boss was right: the book sold for a large amount of money, to a great editor, at the new literary imprint of a good publisher. A crossover literary thriller. Gold. “We did it!” my boss said, generously, to the group gathered near my desk. Had I ever seen her in such high spirits? I wasn’t sure. But I was happy—as all assistants are, perhaps—to see my boss happy. Ecstatic.

“You did it,” I said, smiling. It was true.

“I suppose,” she said with a shrug. She was, I suddenly realized, an unlikely leader, a reluctant president. She disliked being at the center of attention, having us all at her beck and call. This was why she came and went with barely a word to me. Not out of hauteur. She was shy, quiet, retiring. “We’re going for drinks tonight. All of us.”

And so we filed out, at five, to the stark, 1980s-style restaurant around the corner and sat at the bar—birds on a wire—drinking cocktails.

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