The literary agent is a mysterious and camera-shy creature, rustling busily in the literary undergrowth, her tracks visible only to those familiar with the species and its habits. If we were in the mood to further pursue this metaphor, we might compare her to one of those small but weirdly powerful wild cats one might glimpse in an episode of Planet Earth, only about knee-high but capable of causing great scurrying and alarm merely by swishing her tail. As Laura McGrath, a literary historian, argues in Middlemen, her history of the profession, “no figure has been more significant, and yet more invisible, in American literature than the literary agent.”

Take, for example, the agent Candida Donadio, a legendary figure with impeccable taste whose regular table at the Italian Pavilion restaurant in New York was “the undisputed central node in the network of the U.S. publishing industry” in the sixties. One of her clients was Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel, V, Donadio had helped to publish in 1963. A few years later, Pynchon’s trusted editor was moving to a new publishing house, and Donadio persuaded him to “throw something together” in order to fulfill his contract and follow his editor to Viking. The product of Donadio’s prompting was The Crying of Lot 49, today considered a masterpiece of postmodernism.

Agents, McGrath suggests, are the first and most consequential gatekeepers in contemporary publishing. Though the agent’s hand is rarely visible outside a book’s acknowledgments section, agents often play a decisive role in developing a manuscript long before an editor acquires the book. This can mean anything from editing “at the 30,000-foot level, thinking with their client about positioning their book in the market” to close line editing. “We all edit,” says one anonymous agent interviewed in Middlemen. “We think about the book not just as a piece of art … but also how it will be most appealing to the audience it’s intended for.” All of this will be obvious to anyone who works in the publishing industry, but one strength of McGrath’s book is that she comes to the subject as an unjaundiced outsider. A professor of English literature who has never worked in publishing, McGrath describes the mechanisms and eccentricities of the industry with a clarity and curiosity that insiders don’t necessarily have.

Over email, McGrath and I discussed the importance of the debut novel, the relationships between agents, editors, and clients, and the almost mystical significance of the publishing lunch.

INTERVIEWER

You call agents the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field—what do you mean by that, and how did you come to see them that way?

LAURA B. MCGRATH

Agents have so much influence over American literature, and yet they’re virtually invisible outside of a few square blocks of Manhattan or a few corners of the literary internet. Agents decide who gets access to the literary marketplace and who doesn’t, by virtue of their decisions about who to represent. They control the way books get published, by determining which editors to pitch and how to position a project and how best to advocate on their writer’s behalf. They educate writers about the ins-and-outs of the publishing industry and help writers decode, and sometimes appease, the market. Because agents serve as mediators between the author, on the one hand, and the publisher, on the other, they embody the contradictions of contemporary publishing. It’s not either art or commerce with agents—it’s always both.

INTERVIEWER

You say that before you started working on this book, you knew agents only by their stereotypes. What changed your view?

MCGRATH

I imagined literary agents were like Looney Tunes characters, walking around with dollar signs for eyes. I assumed that they were interested only in money. I’d been influenced by the Hollywood agents I’d met—charming but also sleazy, doing a lot of coke. But the days of making a fortune in publishing are past. I didn’t have a good sense of the financial realities of the industry. If they only cared about making money, they would’ve gone to work at Goldman Sachs.

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