Helen DeWitt Lacerates the Literary World
Helen DeWitt. Photo: Zora Sicher.
The literary world is small. Once you’ve worked a few jobs in or around the publishing industry—I’ve been an intern at a trade magazine, an editorial assistant at an old-school book review, a publicist for a university press, a freelancer for more publications than I can easily count, and a fiction writer—it can begin to feel, only somewhat inaccurately, as though you’ve met everyone who works with books. One of my fellow former assistants just replaced another one of our former colleagues as the reviews editor for a prestigious literary magazine. While feeling especially awkward at a New York party a couple years ago, I struck up a conversation with the woman standing next to me. She was my agent’s assistant; she’d just read my manuscript. She had some notes.
As someone who has spent the majority of the past five years writing fiction, this familiarity has had limited professional utility (my “friends” have too much “integrity” to shuffle my work into print-on-demand), and it also presents challenges for the work itself. For one, cynicism is an unattractive quality in a fiction writer,.
