Home Land‘s Terrorists

After narrating 30 rejections at 24 houses, the NY Obersver finally delivers Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land a happy ending in paragraph nineteen:

Mr. Lipsyte eventually found his devoted partisan in Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Lorin Stein, who worked out a special arrangement whereby Mr. Stein edited the book and F.S.G. partner Picador USA put it out over here. “This was, for many of us, our favorite book,” he said. “We just could not understand what was happening.”

Stein’s quote also serves as a good description of Wesley Yang’s article. Yang reasons that, if a) Home Land deserves its good reviews, then b) the publishing industry deserves a good thrashing. But every editor willing to talk to Yang claims to have loved Home Land and fought for it, eventually losing out to higher, mysterious but mercenary, forces. To what degree those higher forces represent editors’ own poor judgment remains unclear — though it’s easy to imagine Home Land as a mousy girl who took off her glasses in time for the prom, and editors’ vows of love as lust for a retroactive competition.

Among the most adoring suitors is Gerald Howard, “the tall, gray-haired” executive editor at large of Doubleday/Broadway Books, Lipsyte’s former publisher.

“I knew for a fact, insofar as these things can be facts, that this book was better than 95 percent of the fiction published in any given year,” said Mr. Howard. “Why weren’t people picking up this tremendous book? What the hell was going on? It had me muttering to myself for a long time.”

A question quickly sprang to mind: If Mr. Howard loved Home Land so much, why didn’t he publish it himself?

… When Mr. Lipsyte sent out Home Land in early 2003, it went to Mr. Howard first. But though he tried to buy it, others prevented him. Home Land didn’t find favor with some readers at the house who supported The Subject Steve [Lipsyte's debut]. “In combination with his sales record, I was left with very little or no hand to play,” said Mr. Howard.

Similarly, Stein’s adulations on behalf of FSG make another question “spring to mind”: if Home Land was “for many of [them], [their] favorite book,” why is Home Land a paperback? Stein describes the books favored by most editors as like “what Ralph Lauren is to real clothing designers,” but, as to how a supposedly couture book like Home Land becomes ready-to-wear, Stein doesn’t comment.

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