Andrew Wylie Takes Paris

The sale of the Louvre's name to Abu Dhabi for $520 million received more attention, but another blow, of a sort, landed on French cultural traditions this week: The New York literary agent Andrew Wylie, who represents such highbrow but also high-selling authors as Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie, announced in Le Monde that he has signed three French writers: two novelists, Christine Angot and Philippe Djian, and a journalist, Florence Hartmann.

While Mr. Wylie's signing a new client would be no big news here, in France, he has done the equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into the traditional world of French publishing. In France, very few authors are represented by agents. Instead, French publishers perform the functions of an agent: negotiating subsidiary rights sales — translation, paperback rights, film rights, etc. — and taking a substantial (usually 50%) cut. In Mr. Wylie's view - which he has already laid out in a sharp exchange of letters in Le Monde with the publisher André Schiffrin, of the New Press - this structure is to blame for many of French literature's ills, from its failure to make a substantial impact abroad to its stylistic solipsism.

If you ask people in American publishing what's going on in France, Mr. Wylie said in an interview, they say nothing. After doing his own research, he said, he decided that actually there is a lot going on, but, because of the role of publishers in managing their authors' foreign rights, French authors were not being effectively marketed in the America.

It's not the fault of the publishing house employees, he said, but "if you were trying to buy a company in England, you wouldn't call your accounting department and have them speak to the accounting department of the company in England. You would go chief executive to chief executive."

In Mr. Wylie's view, the traditional relationship between French authors and their publishers is at the beginning of a chain of consequences that ultimately leads to a culture of insularity.

"It's as though you were to take a writer, nail shut all the windows in the writer's room and seal the door, and then expect the writer to communicate well with the outside world," he explained.

His intent, he said, is "to just slip into the room and throw open the windows and leave the door ajar and then walk out of the room again." For the next year, he'll go to Paris once a month and take on a few writers. And he expects that his efforts will have a kind of domino effect.

"What will happen is that French writers will understand — because I'll explain— what the contractual issues are, and then they will either respectfully request these changes in their own contracts or will hire local agents. There will probably be an increasing representation of writers within France, and that will begin to erode, or transform, the way that French literature is perceived outside of France."

Mr. Wylie's ambition — some might say, grandiosity — has already rubbed some people the wrong way, most notably Mr. Schiffrin. He wrote an article in Le Monde in January in response to a profile of Mr. Wylie. Mr. Schiffrin criticized Mr. Wylie for selling his authors' books to whatever publisher offered the largest advance, disregarding loyalty and longterm relationships.

The director of the French publishing house P.O.L. Editeur, Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, said that, because of the way French intellectual property law is organized, there isn't a need for agents. In France, authors hold what is called the droit moral — the right for their work not to be appropriated or tampered with. This overrides all contracts with publishers, so there is no need for an agent to defend an author's rights. And while there have always been agents in France, he said, none have succeeded in gaining much influence.

Of publishers' 50% stake in subsidiary rights, Mr. Otchakovsky-Laurens said: "This seems huge, but it's also what allows publishers to take risks on authors and on works that won't necessarily sell well. I have the impression that in the U.S., the big publishers only publish books that can be marketed, and the difficult books are published by small presses or university presses, so they are marginalized. In France, the same editors publish unknown authors, and authors who will never sell a lot of books, like poets, and best sellers."

Agents are never interested in authors with weak sales, he said. He recalled one French agent, François-Marie Samuelson, coming to him to announce that he had taken on one of his authors. "But he said, ‘Obviously, we're leaving you the poetry,'" Mr. Otchakovsky-Laurens said.

At the same time, a panel discussion this week among a group of editors who recently returned from a trip to France and Germany, sponsored by the German Book Office, the French-American Foundation, and the French government, provided some support for Mr. Wylie's assertions. An editor at Harcourt, Jenna Johnson, noted that the French seemed to take as given that translating was an inherent good that everyone agreed on, whereas the German editors made more focused arguments for why certain books would work in the American market.

Another participant, the deputy fiction editor of the New Yorker, Cressida Leyshon, noted that French seemed very concerned with their "crisis" in fiction, and intent on learning what their American colleagues thought of "auto-fiction" — a French genre that blends novel and memoir — which the Americans had to confess they didn't read.

And while the panel's moderator, Chad Post, described the situation for translation in America as dire — only 52 new French literary novels were published in translation in America between 1999 and 2005 — not everyone agrees.

"I think there is a closedness, among Anglo-Saxons in general, to the literature of other countries, but French literature makes out all right," Mr. Otchakovsky-Laurens said. "And I also know there are some books that aren't exportable."

And the agent Georges Borchardt, who helps two French publishing houses, Éditions du Seuil and Éditions de Minuit, sell their authors' books in America, said he thinks the system works well and that literary novels that will have an appeal here generally find publishers.

As for Mr. Wylie, according to Mr. Otchakovsky-Laurens, one of his new clients, Mr. Djian, was formerly represented by Mr. Samuelson. So at this point Mr. Wylie has already introduced one innovation: agents poaching.