McGrath writes with a deft and dust-free feeling for scene and character that is matched by the depth and clarity of her analysis ... The journalistic ease of these pages is enormous fun ... Middlemen has a few blind spots ... The major one lies in its avoiding much sustained discussion of more commercial or genre fiction. McGrath’s focus is on the frankly canonical end of things, on Kerouac and Morrison, Pynchon and Colson Whitehead, the books that get taught and have some chance of being read in the future.
McGrath devotes a whole chapter to lunch. This may not be enough. As dolphins bond through synchronized swimming, agents and editors dine out in a ritualized exchange of gossip that sustains, somehow, entire careers ... Conjure[s] a wheezing twine factory—the relic of a bygone era, marred with unsightly retrofits from which a good yarn may still occasionally emerge.
Not the first book about literary agents, but it is the first to try to take their impact on American fiction seriously ... Impressive ... Middlemen helps answer a range of questions ... By paying close attention to how they talk and what they make happen, she makes the structure of the publishing industry, and the way that it shapes fiction, a little bit easier to see ... Can sometimes drift away from the fact that agents do more than represent authors. ... While Middlemen may concentrate on the powerful few who do it best, McGrath offers a new and important way to orient our understanding of the novel today.
McGrath has capture a great deal of the profession’s strangeness and its significance in the field of cultural production. Yet something vital is missing ... Middlemen doesn’t engage much with writers on the subject of agents. (The same goes for editors.) It’s an absence unexplained by McGrath’s methodology, except insofar as the sociology of literature is generally more interested in structural relations than intimate ones, demand rather than supply ... A little bloodless ... I wish Middlemen had more time for the spontaneous, idiosyncratic, human aspect of the job.
Thorough, diverting ... Through profiles of famous literary agents and their clients, Middlemen, an invaluable work of literary analysis, goes behind the scenes in the American publishing industry.
Enlightening ... The focus is almost exclusively on literary fiction, leaving readers to wonder about the machinations behind more commercial books. Nevertheless, McGrath’s research is extremely thorough and presented in entertaining prose. Anyone curious about how their favorite books came to be will appreciate this peek behind the curtain.
