Who believes in editors? The title of a new version of James Agee’s posthumous novel, “A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text” (University of Tennessee Press, 582 pages, $49.95), implies that an author’s text is something an editor can only diminish. Of course, this restored version has its own editor, Michael Lofaro, who argues that the previous version, edited by Agee’s longtime friend David McDowell, published in 1957 and quickly canonized, “was far more a construct of its editors than its author and a radically different book.”

Agee himself was never very comfortable with editors. As Mr. Lofaro notes, it was primarily Agee’s fault that the publication of his most famous text, the Depression-era “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” was delayed to 1941 from 1936. Agee was slow to accept changes and could not be hurried. He was not just stubborn, but unrealistic: At one point he demanded that “Famous Men” be published on newsprint, so that sharecroppers would buy it. Later in his career, taking a more conventional stab at mass appeal, Agee worked as a screenwriter, on “The African Queen” and “The Night of the Hunter,” but directors seldom appreciated his voluminous, and highly literary, efforts. The only form in which he flourished during his lifetime was that of weekly film reviewing for Time magazine and the Nation. When he died, in 1955, he left behind a wife, three young children, $450, and the manuscript of “A Death in the Family,” which he had been working on for 20 years.

Though Mr. Lofaro claims that his version is practically a different novel, both versions can be summarized at once. It is 1915 or 1916. An insecure young boy, Rufus Agee, loses his father, Jay, in an automobile accident. Jay is a virile, heroic man who has made a successful transition from the hills of Tennessee to the cultivated neighborhoods of middle-class Knoxville. His widow, Laura, is a pious Catholic with an agnostic father and brother, and after Jay’s death, their collective anguish opens up into a religious debate — in this way, “A Death in the Family” becomes a sly novel of ideas. In the new edition, Mr. Lofaro adds mainly to the beginning of the novel, restoring chapters that portrayed Jay’s relationship with his son. As Mr. Lofaro makes clear, Agee intended this to be an autobiographical novel about his father. But while the added scenes, including a trip to the fair and a joyride in the eventually fatal Ford, contain wonderful material and do contribute to our understanding of Jay, they do not necessarily improve the shape of the novel. It is the latter scenes, concerning Laura’s reaction to Jay’s death and her family’s complex reaction to God’s injustice, that make the novel more than an episodic memoir.

Most striking among Mr. Lofaro’s additions is the new introduction, a heavily symbolic nightmare scene. Agee intended to use this scene to open the novel — and McDowell’s 1957 decision to include instead a tone-setting prose poem Agee had published elsewhere must indeed aggravate our sense of authorial intention. But Mr. Lofaro’s other arguments, about the psychological meaningfulness of the nightmare and the evident thematic linkages between it and latter chapters, remind us that Mr. Lofaro’s interests are academic. He does not display an editor’s eager sense that the novel must be viable and unified, a thing that can take care of itself in the wilderness of the reader’s mind.

What Mr. Lofaro’s version demonstrates, in spite of itself, is that Agee’s novel changed direction and got much better as it went along. Though he may have intended a father-son novel, what came to life was an ensemble novel about his mother’s side of the family and their reaction to his father’s death. McDowell realized this and gave the novel its title, “A Death in the Family.”

Even Agee’s style changes as the novel hits its stride. The dream sequence is marvelous but now seems more old-fashioned than the rest of the novel, and the early chapters read like an extended take on James Joyce’s “moo-cow” method, in the first pages of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” of portraying the fragmentary consciousness of a very young boy. Most of these ended up in McDowell’s version as italicized flashbacks — an editorial liberty, but one that put the reader immediately into the main pitch of the novel. Other added sections are more similar to the main part of the novel, but as McDowell’s version proves, they were not essential.

McDowell’s motive may have been, as Mr. Lofaro implies, to create a saleable novel that would support Agee’s family, but McDowell was also a sincere professional. He did not dumb the novel down, he made it more beautiful. The comparison of these two versions demonstrates that editors can sometimes improve an author’s text, even against the author’s intentions, especially if the text appears to have not quite been finished when the author died.

It is essential that Mr. Lofaro’s scholarship exists, but should it replace McDowell’s edit? The Agee estate will soon have the option of supplanting McDowell’s 1957 version of the novel, the one that won the Pulitzer Prize, with Mr. Lofaro’s version, published for now in a scholarly edition. If that happens, “A Death in the Family” as we know it would apparently not remain in print. Mr. Lofaro does make major improvements on the texture of the whole novel, correcting mistranscriptions and preserving dialect. Perhaps the two versions could be combined — but there’s the problem. Anyone’s edit would fall between two limits: Agee’s unknowable intent and McDowell’s well-known edit. Mr. Lofaro has brought us as close to Agee’s unknowable intent as is likely possible. But the work of an editor is, here, altogether different from that of a scholar. Mr. Lofaro takes us behind the scenes, but McDowell gives us the first thing, a classic, finished book.

blytal@nysun.com