Let the disgust pour through me. Let it seethe. Let it sink in and settle. I wasn’t capable of doing anything more than lying on the sofa, stewing in bitterness and resentment. One likes to think that one’s work will be well-received by these commercial middlemen—because one has seen the crap that’s out there, because it meets one’s own hyper-self-critical standards, and because the few people...

Four weeks passed. I was about to resign myself to not hearing from Charles Wersing, a top New York literary agent, when I checked my inbox one afternoon. “Good to hear from you,” he wrote, and apologized for taking a month to get back to me. He complimented me on my “intriguing” synopsis, and suggested that the novel would require the services of an agent who wasn’t “overly concerned about...