I can only imagine what kind of competition I’m up against to represent you, and I’m going to do everything I can to convince you that I should be your agent. It will hurt, to be sure, if it turns out that I won’t be, but I won’t love this novel any less because I don’t get to sell it, so I want to go ahead and thank you for the chance to have been one of the first people to read it, wherever things go from here—I can only imagine how long a novel this finely crafted must have gestated, and it’s a privilege to have read it so soon upon entering the world (to belabor that natal metaphor). That said, if you’ll give me the chance, I’m going to work like hell to see that it gets the publication, and reception, and readership it deserves. Books like THE ART OF FIELDING, and writers of your caliber, don’t come around very often; in the final reckoning, agents are ultimately only as good as the books they represent, and you’re giving someone a shot here to be the best.

Parris-Lamb then waited for Chad’s response. He would later describe the amount of time that went by as “days.” In fact, it was less than 24 hours. On the other hand, it was more than an hour, and for Parris-Lamb it was excruciating. He was certain that Chad had gone with some faster, older, more powerful agent. Finally, Chad wrote back to say that he was grateful for the e-mail and that he’d be happy to meet.

Parris-Lamb took Chad out to lunch at Craftbar, an elegant eatery just off Union Square. Lunch cost $92, about what Chad had in his bank account. Parris-Lamb still didn’t know whether Chad was considering other agents. “Chad’s quiet. I had no idea how I was doing. I was thinking, Have you had 10 of these lunches already? I could not get a read on him at all.” (A year and a half later, I was the one who told him that every other agent who’d seen it, including his former boss Bill Clegg, had turned the book down; I asked him what he thought of that. “I think that’s crazy,” Parris-Lamb said. “But I guess that’s how it should be—that’s how I know I’m the right person. I think someone would have to be crazy not to like this book.”) When the time came for Chad to ask some questions of Parris-Lamb, he asked just one. Whom would he send the book to? Parris-Lamb was ready for that. “Michael Pietsch and Jonathan Galassi,” he said.

Publishers as Investment Banks

When Chad and I were living in Prospect Heights, we kept very different schedules: Chad would go to sleep early and be up by seven; I would rise late and stay up until two or three. I used to spend the late portion of many evenings in the gigantic Tea Lounge on Union Street in Park Slope, along with a few dozen other people perched over their laptops and the occasional Orthodox Jewish couple on a date. Eventually I noticed a woman who was there pretty much every time I went in, and probably a lot of the times I didn’t, usually until midnight, with what were obviously manuscript pages, reading and reading. She did not look particularly happy to be doing this. I now realize she was an acquiring editor, reading submissions.

There are several levels of editor at a publishing house. There are assistant editors, who deal with minutiae such as line edits, editorial correspondence, and press quotes for the paperback edition of a book. And there are very senior editors, who have graduated to managerial roles—they are no longer very much on the lookout for new book projects, having their hands full running the publishing house. But the editors in between, which is most editors, are acquiring editors. Like agents, and for the same reason, they need to eat a certain number of lunches, introducing themselves and their tastes and interests to those agents so that they will receive their best submissions when the time comes. Some editors, like agents, read the better literary magazines; many young writers have received encouraging notes from Tim Duggan at HarperCollins, one of the savviest editors in the business, after publishing a short story in some obscure but well-regarded venue. Some leave this kind of scouting to the agents. All acquiring editors, however, spend an inordinate amount of time reading submissions. They get perhaps 10 agented submissions a week—meaning someone in the industry has staked his reputation on this being something the editor will like; receive enough bad submissions from an agent and you will stop reading submissions from that agent—and they must read them quickly. Like Parris-Lamb and the other agents he thought he might be up against, editors have no way of knowing who else has the book “on submission” or what the other editors might be willing to do. And if they want to bid for a book, they need to get a certain number of other people in the company to agree.