(Being the reflections of an aging writer bereft of his esteemed literary agent, seeking a new friend in the book racket while plying his craft — novelist, essayist, newsman, smartass — as humbly as his ego allows.)
Rejection #281: Alice Spielburg
by David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — Alice is a literary agent who operates out of an unlikely locale — Louisville. This probably explains why she travels often to various “writers conferences,” which I tend to think of as flesh markets for the desperate. Her next road show will be at the Chicago Writing Workshop on 14 May. She’ll be entertaining — at $29 a head — ten-minute “pitches” from eager young writers, like me.
If she’s thrilled, she’ll supposedly sign you up.
Or maybe not.
I’ve never engaged in this particular exercise, although I’m getting tempted after more than 300 overtures to stony-hearted would-be agents like Alice .
Alice, in her photo, has an endearingly schoolmarmish aspect — vaguely reminiscent of those pioneer pedagogues who ventured to the Plains in the 1880s to run little red schoolhouses, to stand her ground against loutish farmboys and take under her wing the incipient Laura Ingalls Wilders of the great American diaspora.
(Or, maybe she just told the poor girls that literature is a man’s world and they should go back home. Learn how to butcher hogs and block quilts, honey. )
Alice worked in publishing for John Wiley & Sons, then switched sides and learned the agent racket at the Howard Morhaim Agency in Brooklyn. Morhaim is one of those close-to-the-vest outfits that only works through connections and references. No riffraff need apply.
The new Alice, however, is into riffraff. She belongs, for instance, to the Romance Writers of America (a must among agents), Mystery Writers of America, and Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators. She was listed last year by Writer’s Digest as seeking new clients. So, I thought I might be able to pique Alice’s interest in my recently finished novel, The Voice of the Dog (which is my primary query focus since last July). She said she’s looking for “character-driven novels” (no idea what that means but it’s deep-dyed agentspeak). Her preferred genres include “mainstream, literary, mystery… thriller/suspense.”
The Voice of the Dog is all those things, so I shipped my query.
Alice’s rejection read: “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to consider The Voice of the Dog. I’m afraid it’s not right for me, but please keep in mind that mine is a subjective opinion and others will feel differently…”
Alice’s note that her rejection is “subjective” is a standard blow-softener. She’s hitting me upside the head with a sockful of nickels, but it’s a fluffy sock.
But here’s the question Alice begs: Why so subjective? Why, after all these years of literary salesmanship, haven’t Alice and her peers developed even a semblance of aesthetic consistency?
All through the American liberal-arts curriculum, kids like Alice and me learn from that there are established, timeless, immutable, criteria for telling a good book from a dud. Our teachers insist that a great novel like Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby stands above and apart because of its originality of concept, its depth of thought, narrative pace, economy, descriptive clarity, even its symbols, allusions and linguistic rhythms. Together with my teachers, I’ve hunted for ebb and flow in Paradise Lost and examined, with a sense of awe, the uses of dialog in Catcher in the Rye.
According to my teachers, there are rules — flexible but tangible and trustworthy — that distinguish eloquence from pulp, creativity from mimicry. But then, an author (like me) writes a book that aspires to that ideal. Soon, I try another book, and a dozen more, while compiling more than four million words of journalism, essays, fiction, correspondence, confessions, captions and all the verbiage that boils down to a life in letters. I send one of these labors to an agent — or ten of them, or a hundred — and so many, as they spurn the manuscript, reply, “Dear author (or current occupant): Hey, no big deal. Literature is a crapshoot.”
They console me that the arbiters of the written word are typically narcissists with narrow tastes, flying by the seat of pants that come in a hundred sizes, a thousand styles and a million different shades of purple. There is no canon. All is vanity, every life-altering judgment is purely subjective and, frankly, Dear Author, I’d probably ponder for three or four seconds the ms. of Gatsby before telling F. Scott Fitzgerald to hit the road.
Perhaps I’m jaded. But this is my lesson, and conundrum, in a rejection by Alice — who boasts her affiliation with the Romance Writers of America, an outfit that promotes the sort of prose that brings bile to the gorge of every self-respecting literature prof who has ever manned a blackboard.
Romance fiction is — by even the loosest literary measure — crap. By her admission, Alice makes some of her nut marketing romance. Selling crap.
Maybe I’m not being fair. Romance sells like porn. It’s easy reading — painfully predictable, salaciously vicarious. For every agent, romantic shlock is a cash cow that allows her to take on writing more complex, difficult, prickly and high-falutin. Like my stuff. Except not mine, for “subjective” reasons.
In a way, Alice’s kiss-off flatters me. She honors my integrity for not sinking to the easy buck of romance. I could conclude that Alice turned me down because I’m too time-consuming for her to figure out. After all, in those “pitches” she’s going to be fielding in Chicago, each author gets ten minutes for his or her 29 bucks, and then the hook comes out.
I picture Bill Faulkner standing in a gym facing Alice, trying to explain The Sound and the Fury in ten pressure-packed, dazzle-me-or-die minutes. Not that I’m Faulkner, no. But one thing I have on common with him is that Alice would shitcan both of us and offer only the epitaph that there ain’t no such thing as good writing or bad. It’s all up to her.
