On writing and not mattering

Another self-regarding contribution to the what-ails-literature discourse

Round about 2018, my wife suggested that after translating so many other people’s novels, maybe I’d do well to try my hand at one of my own. I had, by then, translated in the neighborhood of three million, not all of them from works of the utmost literary quality. I had done grueling jobs such as rendering into English a twelve-hundred-page paean to the wife of Pericles for a potential series which became a formerly potential series when the purchasers discovered what they’d wasted their money on. I’d done a novel about a medieval horse healer, around seven versions of a film script based on Boris Vian’s I Spit on Your Graves, a treatment for a TV show in which a signing ape holds conversations with a host about historic shipwrecks; I was very tired and not very rich because most of what I’d done was underpaid; and of course I had told myself, before I fell into this line of work, that a writer was what I wanted to become.

Some years before, I’d written a short story about a man divorced twice over who, as his life falls apart, decides to enter the kind of physique transformation challenge that used to feature in muscle magazines. It almost got into McSweeney’s thanks to the intervention of Edmund White – whom I thought of as I woke from my nap today, and I can’t believe he’s really gone - thus joining an illustrious series of almosts in my literary life.

I revisited it and, over the next year, pulled it into a novel of a hundred-odd pages, which I presented to an agent friend of mine who lived in Spain, as I did. She was kind and enthusiastic and told me I needed to find an agent: when I mentioned showing it to someone with an international list in Spain, she warned me against it. “You need a New York agent,” she said (this was, despite everything I say below, good advice). She duly recommended one. This agent replied, which is said to be good, but with backhanded compliments of my work followed by the admission I wasn’t a good bet for her because I seemed more focused on translating than writing (she was right, of course, that the best life-hack for would-be authors is not to have to have a job).

I didn’t take myself seriously enough, I get hurt easily by rejection, so I did hand off my book off to Barcelona-based Agency X, where I thought I’d get a better hearing. I received an elated response. Two agents and I met for lunch, and they told me they planned on making it their big book for Frankfurt; U.S. rights would likely go at auction, and they would try to get the first batch of translations started then, with Suhrkamp and Acantilado and other publishers I admired. It would make a wonderful movie, they said; hopefully they could sell audiovisual rights soon.

Over the next eight or nine months, “My Father’s Diet” was sent to sixty-two editors, scouts, co-agents, and others, all of whom rejected it. The responses were “encouraging,” as they say, and generally boiled down to: beautifully written, but it doesn’t fit on our list. In the meanwhile, the agent I knew took pregnancy leave; the junior agent who replaced her was fired; I was halfheartedly told the agency’s owner would handle my book personally, but she didn’t, and everyone seemed relieved when I asked if we could put an end to our relationship.

An editor I was (and am) close with worked with a Big Five publisher at the time, and had tried and failed to acquire the book there. When Covid hit, he was laid off, to be picked up by UK publisher And Other Stories. And Other Stories had already turned down my book, but reconsidered it when he brought it back to them. I don’t know if they were excited about it, but the book did appear in print in February of 2022.

I was fortunate that some lovely people whom I didn’t know from Adam volunteered to give us such kind blurbs. Apart from Edmund’s, which you see here, Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen wrote, “Adrian Nathan West, one of our best translators, is also one of our best novelists. He gives such solemn care to such mundane American pap and crap even while denying any redemptive power to the effort and it's that denial—sorrowful, but without anger, without delusion—that constitutes his brilliance. My Father's Diet is among the most ruthlessly true chronicles of the culture—of the patrimony—that we, all of us, have ruined.” Lauren Oyler said it was a “strange, funny, sad, and wonderful novel. With the precision of a translator who has very good taste, West captures the bizarre vividness of America better than anyone I've ever read.” Lauren Groff called me a star.

The reviews that followed were good-to-rave, from The New York Times, The Guardian, Sam Sacks at The Wall Street Journal, Alex Perez at The Washington Examiner, Jeremy Lybarger at 4 Columns. The book sold out its first print run. And so I thought, well, it was a bitch to get here, but you did it, big guy.

I began making notes for a book on dementia and on a character I glimpsed vaguely in my mind, a man in his thirties named Henry, from Rocky Mount, North Carolina (I used often to take the Greyhound up and down the East Coast, and there were always boys from there going to see their families). And at the end of 2022, a magazine editor friend (and saint, though not to be named) told me he knew a young agent who was enthusiastic about my work, was employed by Mega Agency Y, and wanted to represent me.

I met her in New York and thought she was wonderful: smart, witty, sardonic, and encouraging. I told her about the novel I was still sketching out and the stories that I’m working on now. She said I needed a big publisher, that if I’d had one my first book would have done much better, and that she would certainly find me one; and she was convincing in the way a lot of people in New York can be when enumerating long lists of people you’ve sort of heard of and telling you how often they meet for drinks.

I sent her chapters of the book as I finished them, and in November of 2023 the thing was done. She could not have been kinder about it, and augured great fortune.

I had asked to see the letter she would send out with the book; I never received it, and I didn’t press it, because of some personality trait I don’t feel like analyzing now but that is certainly a form of idiocy. She turned slow in responding to my texts; was slow in getting my edits; was glacial in telling me what was going on with the book. At the same time, the signs were auspicious: an editor at The New Yorker had read the first chapter and asked to see the entire book, possibly to choose an excerpt; a conversation with an editor I had worked with on two translations turned into a long exchange of encomia about my person. Eventually, I was given a list of editors the book had been sent to; reports came in that they needed more time because it was so long (115,000 words, so not that long); for the first time, mention was made of my inconvenient white male middle-agedness, though this was pretty quickly swept away and I’ll leave it at that, because who isn’t tired of hearing the resentment on that front; finally, the editor who had spoken of me so kindly had passed the book along to his fellow editors to read, so we might suppose an offer was in the works.

More time passed. My agent suffered a series of misfortunes in family and in health, some certainly real, some definitely spurious, all of which led to ignored texts, calls, and emails, promises to talk that didn’t bear out, etc. When we did meet briefly, she told me one editor had asked whether I’d consider cutting the book dramatically, and I said no. She laughed and said she’d told him the same. By now she’d had the book eight months.

As the summer of 2023 graded into fall, our common friend impressed upon my agent that she could not keep neglecting me so, and she passed me along to a fellow agent while she took a leave of absence that wound up being permanent. This new agent was nice and seemed to like my book. At my request, he made inquiries with the editors it had been sent to and it turned out that… NONE OF THEM HAD EVER RECEIVED IT. None of these purported conversations had taken place. At most, a few editors had received an email, followed up, and gotten nothing in reply.

Replacement Agent #2 was kind enough to actually send the book to these people, and eventually, to pass me the horrific letter that was meant to represent my work. The list of editors was short: somewhere between eight and twelve. Some said no; some said nothing. I will quote here from an editor who answered me personally, just to give some sense of the Hellmo level of mortification I experienced upon sensing that my second book would share a fate similar to, but worse than, that of the first:

“I read your new novel almost addictively, finding it immediately and consistently engaging, even though I didn’t really know where you were taking me. Which was fine, because I had the unmistakable sense that I was in good hands, and I was so absorbed in the storytelling and the very lived-in feeling of the characters that I simply wanted to be in their company. I marveled at the range of expression, from the demotic to the recherché, and at the admirably unstaged quality of the conflicts, which made them feel very real. Where I struggled was in how to talk about this book to set it up for success here. It’s ambitious and smart and many other superlatives, and while there are funny moments, I think I was looking for maybe a slightly exaggerated antic quality that might allow me to invoke, say, Franzen or Ben Lerner. I think there’s a playful quality to the book that could be brought out more, almost to give the reader permission to relax into it, in a way that might make the larger social commentary hit even harder. All of which is to say that it was a pleasure to spend time with—it’s when reading manuscripts like yours that work doesn’t feel like work—but I came up short on how to sell it, which is so often the challenge with art.”

Faced with such headwinds, Replacement Agent #2 teamed up with the more experienced Replacement Agent #3, who I never had the sense really liked my work and who kept comparing it to The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, with the idea that I should simplify the complicated as she had done with Greek in that book; my book in no way resembling The Last Samurai, this was not advice I could use, and after a few conversations over Zoom he finally told me I could either gut the thing to maybe but probably not appeal to a big publisher, or, if I wished to pursue independent publishers, I could go piss up a rope.

(One detail I left out of the above is that an editor I know at a good independent publisher offered to buy the book no sooner than it landed in his inbox; Agent 1 scorned his offer, telling me anything other than 75k was an insult; I am the asshole here, because someone who likes and supports your work and has done so for years deserves not to be shrugged off over money. When I went crawling back to him, his catalogue was full for the next two years. If you ever find yourself in my shoes, dear reader, go with the sure bet.)

I now have in hand a book I am certain is twice as good as its predecessor with no prospects to speak of. I have reached out to everyone I know in an attempt to save it, and have been more or less benignly ignored.

Out of ideas, I console myself writing short stories; this is absurd, because nobody reads them; but I feel a need to write fiction, and a conviction that I have hit my stride in the genre, but the novel I have in mind is too big a commitment of time and energy to undertake with the fear that it might end up in a drawer.

I don’t know if my tale is representative somehow, and I don’t especially care. But if it’s entertained you, I’d be grateful if you’d take a look at “My Father’s Diet,” and either way, thanks for reading.