To meet the man most folks consider the greatest literary editor of his generation, head south out of Nashville along Hillsboro Road until you’re well past the Williamson County line. Once you’re chest-deep in McMansion sprawl, take a right onto Old Hillsboro. Keep going until the subdivisions fall behind, replaced by rolling horse farms. Eventually you’ll come into a nondescript hollow, where you’ll find a nondescript farmhouse, inside of which you’ll find Gary Fisketjon.
For most publishing-industry denizens, the known world stops along the murky shores of Manhattan Island. They might jet off to a book fair in Frankfurt or a conference on the West Coast, but the idea of actually living outside the confines of a few rarified ZIP codes would never cross their minds. To venture much further would be to unhook themselves from the New York cultural umbilical cord—the jam-packed schedule of power lunches, cocktail parties and book launches that sustain their industry.
At one time, Fisketjon was a part of this scene. In fact, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say he was the scene. In 1984, at 30, he revolutionized publishing with his Vintage Contemporaries paperback imprint, the so-called “yuppiebacks” that introduced millions of readers to hot new writers like Jay McInerney and underappreciated veterans like Raymond Carver and Thomas McGuane. Brash, witty and energetic, Fisketjon and his best friends McInerney and Nashville native Morgan Entrekin (then an editor at Simon & Schuster) were the biggest names in the New York literary world, subjects of countless photo spreads, breathless profiles and gossip column sightings. The hole-in-the-wall restaurants and clubs they frequented became the restaurants and clubs everyone frequented. Literary publishing, once thought dead, was suddenly cool again. And Fisketjon and Co. were the coolest of the cool.
There was, of course, the inevitable backlash. Esquire called him “part New York lit, part Hollywood hustle.” The Christian Science Monitor noted “his unabashed love of salesmanship” and “his reputation for editing with a credit card”—in other words, paying more attention to wining and dining than reading and critiquing.
“When I started Vintage Contemporaries, people thought I would only publish books about kids running around New York snorting coke,” Fisketjon says. But he stuck around, settling in at Knopf in the early 1990s and growing a stable of writers that would put anyone short of Nan Talese to shame: Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Highsmith, Brett Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Kent Haruf, Michel Houellebecq, Donna Tartt, Tobias Wolff.
It’s almost easier to name the great writers he hasn’t edited. His authors have won all the major literary prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Man Booker. Last month, Fisketjon, who is both an editor-at-large and vice president at Knopf, received the 2006 Maxwell E. Perkins Award, the publishing world’s highest honor.
But if Fisketjon is still king of the literary mountain, what is he doing holed up in Leiper’s Fork, Tenn.? The easy answer is that, born and raised on an Oregon mink farm, he was never cut out for city life in the first place.
“Gary’s always been more of a country boy than a city boy,” says Jay McInerney. “He has a real love-hate relationship with New York, one that skews toward the hate part despite his long residence in the city.”
The real reason, though, may lie in the changing nature of publishing itself. Though now the very definition of the editing establishment, Fisketjon rose to prominence by breaking the rules of the editing game. Today it’s a game that’s getting harder simply to play. When Fisketjon started his career, he could block out several hours a day for careful editing. These days he’s assailed by agents, marketing campaigns and film-rights negotiations.
“There is less time for editors to edit,” says Maria Campbell, an international literary scout and friend of Fisketjon. “Everything has gotten more complicated. There are more marketing meetings, more promotional meetings, and there’s more and more pressure to buy, react instantly. Everyone’s drowning.” In other words, to continue his success in the New York publishing world, Fisketjon had to get the hell out of New York.
Gary Fisketjon is sitting at his kitchen table, smoking Camels and drinking black coffee. In the film version of his life, he would be played by Nick Nolte—he has Nolte’s weathered voice, sturdy frame and swept-back dirty blond hair, though his face is slightly less lined and his features somewhat softer. He speaks rapidly but carefully, all the while drawing his fingers along the seams of the table’s old wood slats. There’s an outdoorsman-like huskiness to him that belies the many years spent hunched over a desk.
Indeed, Fisketjon didn’t start out trying to revolutionize publishing. He grew up in rural Oregon, and in high school was a good enough golfer to consider going pro. But he opted instead to head east, to Williams College, with vague thoughts of an academic career. He graduated in 1975 with degrees in philosophy and history—“certifiably unemployable,” he says—and gravitated toward Boston and the grad school application process. But he soon grew disillusioned with the ivory tower life that awaited. And so, on the recommendation of friends, he entered the Radcliffe Publishing Course. (Then at Harvard, it is now ensconced at Columbia.)
At Radcliffe, he was, by all accounts, a standout. “I taught there for 10 years and, without question, he was the star,” William Guthrie, one of his teachers, recalled in the Christian Science Monitor. “Radiantly intelligent, imaginative and with a keen mind.”
The Radcliffe course is also where Fisketjon met Entrekin, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. (Entrekin is a 1973 graduate of Montgomery Bell Academy.) “We sat in alphabetical order, and because our names were next to each other, we sat together,” Entrekin says. When the course finished, the pair set off for New York.
In the late 1970s, New York was violent, poor and seemingly on the verge of social collapse. It was also, at least in retrospect, the perfect place for a smart, ambitious young person to get a foothold in a low-paying career like publishing. Living was cheap, the culture was aboil, and a generation of white flight and youth counterculture had left the job market wide open. “In a way, there was a missing generation in publishing,” says Fisketjon, who landed a job at Random House and quickly rose through the editorial ranks. “Companies were looking around, saying, ‘We’re all old; we should get some young people.’ ” At the same time, as befit the late-’70s/early-’80s American malaise, more than a few commentators bemoaned the imminent demise of publishing, even the novel itself, in the face of postmodernism. “It felt like, if not a dead business, a dying business,” Fisketjon says.
The problem, he soon saw, lay less in intellectual faddishness or the dumbing down of America than in the structure of publishing itself. There were essentially two forms of books being published: hardcover and mass market paperback. Hardcover was costly to publish and expensive to buy, and as a result only the marquee names—the classics, along with a few contemporaries like Norman Mailer and John Updike—appeared in it. But mass market, usually found on drugstore bookracks and airport newsstands alongside political potboilers and sweaty bodice rippers, was hardly the right format for an emerging literary novelist. As a result, an enormous number of talented young, and even middle-aged, writers were either unnoticed by the discerning public or off the grid completely, appearing only in East Village chapbooks and DIY literary journals.
While he was making his mark as a young turk editor, Fisketjon was enjoying the New York literary scene with his sometime-roommate, McInerney. His East Village apartment “was vaguely loft-like and great for parties, of which we had more than our fair share,” he recalls. “Lots of writers, lots of drinks and whatnot, lots of hangovers. Mostly it was just young people having fun, a few of them leaving somehow without their eyeglasses or their shoes.” But it was also at those parties—and dozens of others—that Fisketjon and McInerney rubbed elbows with some of American literature’s biggest bold-faced names. “We were meeting some of our literary heroes,” McInerney says. “We were meeting people like George Plimpton, Gordon Lish, Robert Stone and Harold Brodkey.”
By 1984, As a result of his professional and social success, Fisketjon was well-placed for his charge against the publishing barricades. He knew dozens of promising young writers with nowhere to publish—“All sorts of writers could be picked up for nothing”—and he had the political capital to create a forum for them. The solution was Vintage Contemporaries—a line of high-quality trade paperbacks, with McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City as its first original title. Hardcover books being expensive even back then, Fisketjon was betting that readers would be more willing to try a new author in a cheaper, though still high-quality, format.
Today, almost everything on the bookstore shelves is in trade paperback, but at the time it was a radical notion. Even as they shied away from taking risks on running new authors in hardcover, publishers also fretted that debuting a book in paperback would condemn it to obscurity—that no critic would review it, that no serious reader would buy it. “Some vice president came up to me and said, ‘Look, a lot of people think you’re making a mistake not doing [Bright Lights, Big City] in hardcover,” Fisketjon says. They stopped thinking it was a mistake when it sold a quarter of a million copies.
Fisketjon and McInerney were soon at the center of a literary phenomenon. The New York literary world, once below the radar, suddenly burst onto the national scene. Writers like Brett Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz went from obscurity to celebrity overnight, their books snapped up by major publishers and film producers. Anyone living in Greenwich Village with a manuscript could get lunch with a power agent and a profile in New York. Readings, once patronized by a small clique of scenesters, became social calendar musts. “It’s hard for anything to be underground now,” McInerney told the New York Times Magazine in 1987. “If something below 14th Street pops up on Monday, by Tuesday it’s in the papers.”
By 1987, Fisketjon and McInerney had moved to Atlantic Monthly Press, where Entrekin had set up his own imprint. The three had hopes of building a tight literary synergy—“a sort of galaxy of our own,” McInerney told the Times Magazine. But by then the backlash had begun. Just as the late ’80s saw the decline of the John Hughes Brat Pack film, so too readers and critics turn against the yuppie urban novel. What had been fresh and exciting was suddenly superficial and boring. Even today, Fisketjon says, “Neither Jay nor Brett can get a fair shake. Brett’s last book [Lunar Park] was phenomenal. There were a few good reviews, but a lot of people think they [already] know everything about Brett.” And Fisketjon himself was tarred for being someone with a nose for what’s hot and how to sell it—but little else.
In 1990, Fisketjon left Atlantic and returned to Random House, where he settled at Knopf. But rather than fade away, he flourished. He continued editing Ellis and McInerney, and added a slew of big names—McCarthy, Highsmith, Carey—to his roster. Clearly, there was something about him that his detractors had missed. He was, it soon became clear, an example of a species growing increasingly rare in American publishing: the editor who actually edits.
Fisketjon works on one book at a time, and rarely reads a draft twice. He always reads on paper, never a computer screen, and always edits with a green pen. He goes slowly, maybe five pages an hour, filling the margins with suggestions about semicolons, snippets of dialogue, choice of adjectives. Nothing is too minute. “We’ve had terrible arguments about the placement of a comma,” McInerney says.
Richard Ford, who has worked on seven books with Fisketjon, had praise for his editor at last month’s Perkins Award ceremony. “I’ve learned that he’s not going to rearrange my books for me—that he sees this as my business,” he said. “I’ve learned to take inordinate joy from the relatively few things he finds to adore; I have experienced the heady, vertiginous freedom which comes from disagreeing with Gary, and knowing we will not revisit this phrase, so that I’d better be right about it, since it’s permanent.”
Editing, for Fisketjon, is something akin to meditation. He can edit a book only if he can shut out everything around him; he even avoids reading other authors when he’s working on a manuscript. “You have to get into a trance,” he says. “Because an editor can only use the standards set by the book in hand. It’s not like, ‘Why couldn’t this work be like something else?’ It can’t work that way. So you’ve got to get into the vernacular of a book and see where the book is not living up to its best moments and try to point them out.”
During the early years of his career, such close attention to detail helped Fisketjon build a strong editorial and personal bond with the poet and short story writer Raymond Carver, whose habit of endlessly revising was by then legendary. Carver would “go through a dozen drafts of a story, scrawling all over it, getting it retyped, over and over,” Fisketjon says. “I always found him a delight to work with, since we both worked at a very detailed level and kind of spoke the same language.” That friendship stood in stark contrast with the stormy relationship Carver had with his previous editor, Gordon Lish, and Fisketjon’s ability to work easily with someone as infamously difficult as Carver helped cement his reputation.
At a recent book party, I brought up Fisketjon with a writer, who began telling me, wide-eyed, about having once seen a samizdat copy of a Fisketjon-edited page, covered in tiny, brilliant notes. It was like he’d seen Christ’s face in the Shroud of Turin. “That kind of attention, that quality of attention, can be life-changing for writers,” says Jordan Pavlin, a fellow editor at Knopf. “And Gary has dedicated his life to providing it.”
Fisketjon also benefited from the friendships he developed with European editors during his yearly trips, beginning in 1986, to the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest event of its kind in the world. Because of its size, most people in American publishing pay attention to the fair, if only in a desultory fashion—there has rarely been a market for foreign-language books in the United States. But Fisketjon is different. “Gary continues to be one of the few American editorial presences at Frankfurt,” Campbell says. “Gary was one who understood the potential of American writers in the international market and has really made connections for them. Gary is also interested in trying to bring international books here.”
Frankfurt is also where Fisketjon fell under the tutelage of Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, one of the 20th century’s greatest publishers and a European champion of everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy. “He was all heart and elegance, profane and sweet and generous, and we’d spend many, many hours every year drinking Jack Daniels and yacking and smoking cigars,” Fisketjon says. More important, though, is how Ledig-Rowohlt imparted a window into a different world of editing and publishing, one that succeeded by finding and fostering great talent, making long-term investments in writers rather than short-term grabs for the next hot young scribe.
Much of Ledig-Rowohlt’s philosophy seems to come through in Fisketjon’s attitude toward contemporary publishing. He has an optimist’s belief in the health of the reading public and a romantic’s faith in the continued relevance of the independent bookseller. He says he ignores literary trends and, despite shrill warnings of the decline of serious reading, he believes that bright times are ahead for literary fiction. “You always see an ebb and flow,” he says. What remains constant is quality.
Unfortunately, too few editors can afford to share Fisketjon’s perspective today. Beset by marketing meetings, high-pressure agents and complex contracts, many simply don’t have the time, patience and old-school talent to make such long-term investments in writers and their craft. Publishing may not be a more profitable industry than it was 25 years ago, but there is definitely more money involved. In the early 1980s, a five-digit contract for a first book was rare; today, it takes high six figures to make news and seven-figure advances for first-time writers are not unheard of. All of which makes Fisketjon, once an edgy wunderkind, seem almost quaint. Ironically, the modern publishing industry, which he did so much to unleash in the early 1980s, now threatens to undermine the craft that has made him such a successful editor.
Which is not to say that Fisketjon is a relic—on the contrary, part of his success lies in his ability to adapt to the new demands of the industry while maintaining his editorial integrity. “In the last 20 years, there has been a move toward editors as less involved in working on texts and focusing more on business parts,” says Entrekin. “But Gary does that too.”
Nevertheless, it’s hard to identify many editors who seem to be following his lead. Perhaps that’s because the very model of the long-term editor/writer relationship is falling apart. With so much money involved, it’s the rare writer (or literary agent) who will stick with a particular editor in the face of a better offer elsewhere. “We’re in a moment, and I hope it’s a moment, where writers move around all the time, where the next advance needs to be twice what the previous one was, and every writer is sold in the marketplace,” Campbell says. “It doesn’t encourage editors and writers to form long-standing editorial relationships.”
Increasingly beset by his editorial and managerial duties at Knopf and Random House, Fisketjon began taking weekend vacations in Nashville in the mid-1990s, joining Entrekin and, at the time, McInerney, who lived with his then-wife Helen Bransford in suburban Nashville. It was through them that he met Diana Howard, a Mississippi native living in Nashville, whom he later married. “He started coming to Nashville because of me,” says Entrekin (a claim McInerney also makes). “Gary always had an affinity for the South. He had friends there. He’s published a number of Southern writers.… Then, when he met Diana, that was the clincher.”
But Fisketjon was also attracted to the possibility of building a home far from the madding crowds of the New York publishing world. Why else would he buy a run-down farmhouse in the middle of rural Williamson County, at the time reachable only by a gully-riven dirt road?
Ten years later, the house, which stands on the foundation of a previous abode burned during the Battle of Franklin, is still a renovation in progress. A paved street now runs in front, and it’s hooked up to the county water system. Until recently, the Fisketjons lived in a small cabin out back while contractors added an L-shaped hall and kitchen that wrap around a deck of the main house. On a recent weekend visit, Fisketjon was just getting ready to stock a set of built-in bookcases that run the length of the new hall. Everywhere in the house are desks, shelves and easy chairs—the perfect home for an editor.
It is here, then, that Fisketjon comes to do the work that made him successful and that continues to drive the success of his stable of writers. He comes to sit at his kitchen table with its worm-worn wood, or at his window looking out on the Williamson County hills, because it is only here that he finds room and time for his craft. The next great American novel may be written in New York City, or California, or Washington state. But chances are it will be edited in Tennessee.
