Bill Clegg. (Photo by Christian Hansen/AP)

In 2005, Bill Clegg, the handsome, gay cofounder of a thriving Manhattan literary agency, went on a two-month crack spree that destroyed his life. He was 33. It was, as he put it in his first memoir, 2010’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, his “Jesus year.” That book is a stylish record of his swan dive to rock bottom. It’s very readable, in the sense that you’d have to be a Martian to find it boring. It’s short, there’s lots of sex, and whenever a worried friend pops up or remorse sets in there’s always a “thick cloud of crack smoke” to put things in perspective. Mr. Clegg spends much of the book half-naked in hotel rooms, getting high and drinking vodka with “my towel cinched low on my hips.” Usually he has a “partner in crime,” and when he doesn’t he turns to porn. Crack makes him paranoid: he sees DEA agents everywhere, hears footsteps, infers conspiracies. He believes the cabdrivers of Manhattan are malevolently leagued against him. “Lose nothing or lose everything,” he thinks, but ultimately he just loses a lot. As well as $40,000 in savings, he loses his friends, his clients, his business, his reputation, his libido, his boyfriend and 40 pounds. The debauchery is punctuated by bathetic episodes in which he tries to get new holes pierced in his belt; his pants don’t fit him anymore.

Near the end, Mr. Clegg smokes $2,000 worth of crack in a room at the SoHo Grand, downs a bottle of sleeping pills and nearly dies. “What now?” he thinks, bankrupt in his hospital bed, so of course it’s off to rehab. A few months later, he returns to the city: “Gradually, mornings become merely mornings, not panic-stricken hours managing the consequences of not coming home before daybreak.” There are signs, though, that he may have more writing in him. Vignettes from a troubled past interweave the narrative of his binge. There is an atmosphere of things not dealt with, of stewing neuroses. “I am not in a hurry to leave this process of letting go of the many secrets that I had spent a lifetime squirreling away,” he thinks at the tail end of one futile trip to detox. Still, when Mr. Clegg, now sober, unexpectedly gets offered another job in publishing, the book more or less wraps on the spot. Things have cooled down, and the vein of good copy has dried up.

The new book, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery (Little, Brown and Company, 208 pages, $24.99), fills out a story that was telescoped into a few paragraphs in the old book: it is about Mr. Clegg’s return to New York. The process by which the panic-stricken dawns became mere mornings, it turns out, was prolonged. He kept smoking crack, and the good copy kept coming. The title refers to “a milestone that many fellowships and organizations dealing with alcohol and substance abuse use to mark a strong foothold in sobriety.” Pursuit of this foothold structures the memoir, as it structured the period of Mr. Clegg’s life it covers, and there is many a slip and stubbed toe. He gets within “spitting distance of ninety days,” and then he relapses. He goes a few weeks; and then he relapses again. “Enough is enough,” says his mother, and he agrees—but soon enough he’s “on autopilot,” which in Cleggian means having a crack-stoked foursome in Soho. He’s up, he’s down, he’s up, and he’s down. “Why do I always want to die?” he wonders “impatiently.”

In the last chapter of the book, which was completed last year, Mr. Clegg admits that he relapsed again recently, after five and a half years of spotless sobriety. “For me, there are no finish lines,” he writes. “No recovered, just recovering.” Then he describes the apotheosis of admitting this in a “meeting.” This completes a shift of emphasis that the whole book works to enact. For it is the meetings of addicts, not the “terrible but hilarious stories” of their addiction, that he commemorates in Ninety Days.

Post-rehab, Mr. Clegg was jobless, aimless and nearly penniless, “a Dickensian speck in a city that no longer [had] use for me.” His social life was moribund, he was “qualified to do absolutely nothing,” and he didn’t have an apartment: he slept on a futon in the West Village studio of an understandably wary former friend. All Mr. Clegg had to fill his days were the meetings of “a fellowship” for addicts. The fellowship was suggested by his sponsor, Jack—a jukebox of the platitudes of recovery: “[Jack] metabolizes what I imagine are insurmountable obstacles into simple phrases like One day at a time and Take it easy, which I find at once baffling, patronizing, and comforting.” Mr. Clegg goes to a lot of meetings, and by the end of the book he is “cling[ing] to” these phrases he used to “cringe at.” More than the saga of his recovery, Ninety Days is the story of his embrace of the methodology of recovery: its mores, credos, precepts. In the final pages of Portrait, he had noted a stirring of his feelings toward “something less self-concerned.” He has delivered on this stirring by writing a memoir that is an ode to a community. It is “the flip side” of his crack paranoia. He does not “count days” alone.

Thus we meet Annie, an actress who went on a bender and totaled her career, and Polly, a cokehead who lives with her twin, Heather (another cokehead). Polly and Mr. Clegg attend meetings together and walk dogs in Union Square Park. They are bantering competitors in the race to 90 days. He relapses, and she scolds him. She relapses, and he scolds her. They are “fluent in the language of falling apart”; Polly jocosely calls him “Crackhead.” We also meet Asa, a heroin addict and urban planner. With his “halo” of “preposterous” red hair, the serendipitous Asa is always around the corner and primed to intervene when Mr. Clegg starts in on a “death dance.” Somewhat less serendipitously, Asa falls in love with him. “Let’s face it,” Mr. Clegg tells him. “I’m hardly a catch.”

Recovery, for Mr. Clegg, is an even mix of bonhomie and boredom. “I wonder what I’ll do all day, how I’ll fill up the hours, where I’ll go,” he thinks. Besides going to meetings, he works out, eats granola and looks forward to afternoons of Oprah with “the fizzy energy of watching the Academy Awards.” Mostly, though, he sits around waiting for the old urges and the crises they entrain—or for addict friends to call him up and yak about their urges. He is good at evoking the persistence of addiction—the “sudden craving, the world narrowing to one desire.” He isn’t as good as Burroughs or Exley or Jim Carroll (or, more recently, Edward St. Aubyn), but he is good enough for the tale of his rehabilitation to give you an unseemly nostalgia for the tale of his dissolution. Sometimes the burdens of dramatizing his rise from the abyss send his style into free fall: “I can make it, I think desperately, meaning both the meeting and in general.”

More generally, though, the problem is that Mr. Clegg doesn’t explain how a man who lives for language could subscribe to a program that employs it so carelessly. His embrace of the culture of recovery makes emotional sense—he is weak, he wants consolation, he needs the camaraderie of addicts like he needs “oxygen”—but it doesn’t make literary sense. The personal redemption comes at the cost of a host of unredeemable clichés. At one point, he alludes to James Frey, a guy who wrote with “macho arrogance” and went on Oprah to crow about “how he relied on his own willpower to quit.” Though he admits that, in the thick of his addiction, he “strongly identified” with Mr. Frey’s attitude, Mr. Clegg doesn’t tell us how he got past that attitude, except by reminding us of the chaos it led him into. It leaves one wishing he had told a slightly larger story, of how a stylist of his powers found sustenance in rhetoric like “The truth will set you free”—of how he learned to speak in “a voice that is mine and not mine.” As it is, the heart and the mind are split. You root for him as he finds an apartment, a romance, a friend group and finally a job. But you count on the relapses to keep it interesting.

editorial@observer.com

Ms. DeWitt.

The first time Helen DeWitt disappeared was in 2000.

Her debut novel, The Last Samurai, was on the verge of becoming a publishing sensation. It would eventually sell more than 100,000 copies in English and be translated into 20 languages. People told Ms. DeWitt she was a star. Tina Brown, the owner of Talk Miramax Books—the short-lived publishing imprint of her short-lived Talk magazine—wanted to throw her a big release party at the office. Ms. DeWitt did not believe she could handle that. She thought she was going insane and she told everyone as much. “I tell people I try not to go insane,” she said last month over coffee in a diner by Penn Station, a few hours before catching a plane back to Berlin where she currently lives. “And they think it’s funny and then I go insane and they get mad.”

She made it through to the end of the party. She was living in England at the time and had flown in for the occasion, but before that she had put her affairs in order. She gave away her clothes and put her books in storage. She went to the Talk party on Nov. 29, 2000, and after a few days, she left. She got on a train—“my body got on a train” is the way she puts it—got off in New Haven and checked into a hotel. How she spent her days is anyone’s guess. When she speaks about it today, she makes vague allusions to Niagara Falls. She was gone for about two weeks and ended up at her mother’s in a suburb of Washington, D.C. She fired her agent, returned to England and put off trying to sell her second novel.

That novel was called Lightning Rods, and it came out two months ago, with the much smaller press New Directions. She tried at various points over the past decade, but Ms. DeWitt could not get the book published before then. The book should have seen the light of day almost 10 years ago, when it was bought—after lengthy negotiations—by Jonathan Burnham, Ms. DeWitt’s editor and the editorial head of Talk Miramax. He bought the rights and paid Ms. DeWitt her advance, but the novel never surfaced.

Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative assistants—nicknamed Lightning Rods—that have anonymous sex with the male employees in an office through a glory hole in the bathroom. He says he can convince people that this is a substitute for ordinary sex, and a way of guarding against workplace sexual harassment. The idea sweeps the nation and changes everything. Ms. DeWitt gives the last word of her novel to George Washington: “In America anything is possible.”

Many writers have gone mad trying to finish a manuscript, but Ms. DeWitt, who has a history of depression, is one of the few to lose her mind from the process of trying to publish one. The industry beat her down and wore her out. Mr. Burnham said she was “completely enveloped” in every detail of Last Samurai—from the choice of type to the layout of the page. It drove her to the edge. Like Lightning Rods, Last Samurai had also been bought by one publisher—Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld—before being published by another. After reading Ms. Wilson’s comments on the manuscript—“crap comments,” Ms. DeWitt says—she wrote to her agent, Stephanie Cabot, then at William Morris, and said she would commit suicide if she had to keep working with her. She then wrote to Ms. Wilson, thanked her for her comments and informed her she was going away to work on other books. She wanted to “protect her book from the publishing process.” She retreated to a house in Chesterfield in the north of England and started a number of novels; Lightning Rods was the first that she finished.

She wrote it, she said, because she “felt like she was getting fucked from behind through a hole in the wall” by the publishing industry.

Ms. DeWitt was born in 1957. She has platinum blond hair and a youthful face made more girlish by thick-rimmed glasses. She earned her PhD in classics at Oxford, where she wrote her doctorate on propriety in ancient literary criticism, but gave up her academic career in 1988 when she was finishing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in Arabic poetics. She has varying degrees of fluency in multiple languages, including French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian.

This knowledge informed her debut, which some critics read as a novel about translation. The protagonist of The Last Samurai, Ludo, is an unusually bright boy who is raised by his mother; as a substitute for his absent father, she has him watch Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (the book’s original title), about a village that hires seven ronin samurai to guard them against bandits. Ludo’s mother refuses to reveal his father’s identity, so he goes on a search for him. The book is a linguistic and aesthetic triumph, seamlessly weaving Greek, Japanese and various other languages into the narrative framework. For that reason, Ms. DeWitt was very particular about the book’s punctuation and typesetting. Greek, with its subtle and significant use of varying accents turns to gibberish if not printed correctly.

In 1998, after Last Samurai’s first deal with Weidenfeld went sour, Ms. DeWitt retreated to the English countryside to write more books; she had given up hope on selling her debut right away. She was at work on several novels, keeping tabs on them by maintaining an elaborate spreadsheet of each manuscript’s title with a word count next to it and the date she expected it to be finished. If she wrote 2,000 words in one day on a given manuscript, she would adjust the date accordingly. After about 10 months, she had finished Lightning Rods. She showed the book to Mr. Burnham at Miramax before she showed him Last Samurai. He wasn’t thrilled by it so she showed him her other book.

“Helen thought Lightning Rods would be very easy to sell and Last Samurai would be very difficult,” Mr. Burnham said. “But I felt that The Last Samurai was a masterpiece.”

He took the novel to the Frankfurt Book Festival, where his hunch proved correct: it quickly became apparent that Last Samurai would be the breakthrough novel of the season.

Ms. DeWitt was looking for an editor who was an intellectual equal and who understood the value of her words. In Mr. Burnham she found someone who at least would give her a contract guaranteeing her the final say on usage. This is very rare. Writers write and editors edit. That is how the publishing industry works. But Ms. DeWitt thought the only way she would remain sane was if she could get Last Samurai into print in two months. She made her final changes to the book’s punctuation and style and sent it off to the copy editor. When she received the 600-page manuscript with the copy editor’s proofs, Ms. DeWitt’s edits had been covered over with whiteout. There were hundreds of changes. “O.K.” was spelled out “okay,” “15” was “fifteen” and so on. “I am Helen DeWitt,” she said. “I wrote this book. You want to write OK as o-k-a-y go write your own novel.” She admits it sounds trivial, but Mr. Burnham himself called her “one of the great talkers and one of the great readers of our time.” She is careful and possessive with her words. Ms. DeWitt had not made a photocopy of her initial edits and had to painstakingly redo them.

“If they had sent a team to my house,” she said, “and just taken a truncheon and smashed my computer and taken my books and stripped the place bare, people would see that as outrageous. But if they just kill the mind that wrote the book, they don’t see that as bad. The point is, once something goes wrong in this particular business, it is very hard to make right.”

It was at this time, near the beginning of 2000, when Ms. DeWitt began to entertain the thought of suicide.

“Joe was the first to admit that he made a lot of mistakes when he started out,” Ms. DeWitt writes in Lightning Rods. “He worried about all the wrong things.” One of his biggest mistakes, Joe says, was thinking that the hardest part would be finding women who would agree to have anonymous sex with their co-workers through a hole in the bathroom wall: not two weeks went by before he’d talked 19 women into believing they were right for the job. The problem was that sex in a bathroom stall felt “clinical and impersonal.” He considers solving this problem by having the woman leave her skirt on so the man can hike it up, but that would compromise the anonymity. He realizes the whole aesthetic is off. For one thing, the toilet would have to go. Joe “seriously underestimated the time he was going to need to get this baby off the ground.”

In 2001, when Ms. DeWitt was living in London, recovering from the depression that had prompted her earlier disappearance, Mr. Burnham had a change of heart about her second book. He made an offer, but Ms. DeWitt turned it down. She didn’t want to deal with the publisher’s world rights department a second time, which was claiming she was still $75,000 in the red for Last Samurai. Mr. Burnham upped the offer to a $525,000 advance for two books. This went back and forth for a while, with Mr. Burnham coming down in the price and eventually offering $400,000 for two books. In addition to Lightning Rods, Ms. DeWitt had proposed a book about poker. “Dealing with the publishing industry was a game of poker,” she said. “Not bridge, where you gather information and use it. It’s a game of lies.”

They negotiated a detailed contract offering Ms. DeWitt technical support for the poker book. The design was to be very specific. But the support never happened. Miramax was breaking up. The lawyer who helped draft the contract, Dev Chatillon, left without briefing Mr. Burnham on it. Ms. DeWitt told him Miramax was in breach of contract for not providing her with the support she needed to make the poker book. Mr. Burnham said he no longer wanted to buy Lightning Rods. Ms. DeWitt walked away with $200,000, her advance for Lightning Rods, which had already been accepted; there was still no published book.

The deal had fallen through and Ms. DeWitt, who was at this time staying on Staten Island, reminded Ms. Chatillon that the stipulations of her contract existed to protect her sanity. Then she once again attempted suicide. “I did not know how to write the books I wanted to write,” she said. She had read that if you took a sedative and tied a plastic bag around your head, you would go to sleep and not wake up. At 4:30 in the morning on May 25, 2004, Ms. DeWitt wrote an email to Ms. Chatillon with the subject line “termination”:

“Please call my cellphone. If I don’t answer you can assume that I am dead; in that case, please call my landlord, Silver Sullivan, and ask him to check my apartment. I have left my mother’s name and phone number by the bed.

It would be helpful if you could also tell Sheila Kohler that I will not be able to come to dinner on Wednesday.”

She wrote to Ms. Chatillon because she thought Ms. Chatillon would be indifferent to the email’s content. Writing to her about the proper disposal of her body was, to Ms. DeWitt’s mind, the same as saying, “I’m going out of town and I left a sirloin steak in the cupboard and it will start to smell.” Committing suicide sounds demented, but almost invariably seems practical to the person wanting to do it. As it turned out, the sedative and bag approach was ineffective. About an hour later she sent a second message:

“This method does not work as well as I’d been told, so I will try something simpler elsewhere. There is no need to call my landlord as the body will not be in the apartment. I will also contact Ms. Kohler.”

Once again, her body got onto a train and she disappeared. Her lawyer contacted her family and friends. As she headed north, she received multiple phone calls, which she didn’t answer. News of her disappearance leaked to the press. The Niagara Falls police department found her a few days later. The New York Times, which in a short article described a “suicidal email message to friends,” printed a comment from Lieutenant Joe Morrison of the Niagara Falls police: “She had a history here,” he said.

Ms. DeWitt had met the literary agent Bill Clegg in 1998, when The Last Samurai was still in the hands of Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld. At that time, she was hoping Mr. Clegg could find her a new editor. In 2009, she was reintroduced to Mr. Clegg through the young novelist Ida Hattemer-Higgins. Ms. DeWitt was living in Berlin and working on different writing projects. A short novel, Your Name Here, written in collaboration with the journalist Ilya Gridneff, was excerpted in the literary journal n+1 in 2008. That book never found a publisher, but could be purchased through Ms. DeWitt’s web site. Jenny Turner wrote a nearly 5,000-word review of Your Name Here in the London Review of Books. She said the self-published novel was “like catching a flicker of the future” and praised The Last Samurai as something like “what Joyce and Pound would do with the Internet.” Meanwhile, Ms. DeWitt was becoming widely read as a blogger, cataloguing the grim details of her experience in publishing.

She contacted the defunct Miramax books in 2008 and had it revert the rights to Lightning Rods. Mr. Clegg, now back in the picture, thought he could sell the book in a week to Mitzi Angel at Faber US, but Ms. Angel didn’t think the book was right for her company. Over the course of two months, he sent the novel out to 16 more editors, a checklist of some of the most prominent people in publishing: Hannah Griffiths at Faber UK; Jill Bialosky at Norton; Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown; David Ebershoff at Random House; Andrea Shulz at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Molly Stern at Viking; Lauren Wein at Grove/Atlantic; Gerry Howard at Doubleday; Ethan Nosowsky at Graywolf; James Gurbutt at Constable UK; Nan Graham at Scribner; Dan Frank at Knopf; Anton Mueller at Bloomsbury; Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury; Dan Halpern at Ecco; Sean McDonald at Riverhead. They all turned it down. Most of them liked it; they just couldn’t get over the premise.

Mr. Clegg wanted to resign, but he met once more with Ms. DeWitt, who had flown to New York to show him projects she was working on. She showed him plans for what she calls an “insanely ambitious” novel, the one everyone had wanted from her since Last Samurai. Mr. Clegg was thrilled, but said he wanted to see 100 pages in two months. Ms. DeWitt went to the D.C. suburbs to be with her mother, who required live-in care for about three months after colostomy surgery. Once the surgery was reversed, Ms. DeWitt spent most of her time sitting in intensive care. She did not manage to write 100 pages worthy of submission.

She could not see a way forward. “Fourteen years of publishing crap, no end in sight,” she said. She knew of a 600-foot cliff in Eastbourne. Back in England, she booked a one-way train ticket to Gatwick, an hour from the cliff by train, then checked into a hotel. On Feb. 10, 2010, she sent an email to Mr. Clegg that said, “I’m leaving tomorrow, sorting out a few last-minute things.” She continued:

“… The system strangles the books in the head; it’s not possible to live that way because not living will make someone desperately unhappy.  It goes on too long.   If I had died in 2000 it would have been very simple and clean; the things one does to try to make things work only make it all go on longer.”

Forty minutes later, Mr. Clegg responded:

“None of this—and whatever else is telling you that dying would be better than living—is true, none of it.  As sharply as it may feel so, it is not.   I know, because I reached that black place exactly five years ago.  I failed, somehow, and thank god.  It is snowing today in New York—the fattest flakes against a copper roof out my window.  My brother who is in rehab just called and needed an encouraging voice.  I had lunch with a friend who is having a professional success after years of crushing disappointment.  And you just emailed.  None of these moments would I be here for if I’d left the world when I planned to.”

Ms. DeWitt never made it to the cliff. She sat in her hotel room, smoked, looked at the wall and continued living. It was not long after that when she met with Jeffrey Yang of New Directions. He asked her if he could see Lightning Rods and she said yes.

When Joe’s Lightning Rods business really begins to catch on, he gets a visit from an FBI agent. He thinks to himself: “Holy shit.” The FBI agent, instead of arresting Joe on the spot and shutting down his business, tells him that the public sector is the place where a service like having sex through a hole in the wall is really necessary. People who serve in the public sector, the agent says, “you don’t know when, or how, they’re going to blow.” The bureau would provide a range of locations for Joe to operate his business. They would give him the opportunity to serve his country “and make a profit at the same time.” Joe says, “There comes a time when you have to recognize that you can’t always do things exactly according to plan.”

mmiller@observer.com

Lin.

As the foremost chronicler of the young novelist Tao Lin's every whim, The Observer was hoping we might break the story of Tao Lin's next book deal, which he announced he was shopping a couple weeks back. Then, on a Sunday when our moods were already dampened by incessant rain and the looming prospect of Monday, Mr. Lin wrote to inform us that we had lost the story to Mike Vilensky at The Wall Street Journal. So he granted us an interview.

"Mike 'scooped' the news via Clegg himself," read the e-mail from Mr. Lin we received in our inbox as Sunday turned into Monday, The Wall Street Journal went to the presses, and the rain thundered down. "Clegg" is Bill Clegg, Mr. Lin's agent at William Morris Endeavor. The announcement can be found here. The novel, entitled Taipei, Taiwan, will be released as a paperback on Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

"Vintage/Knopf publishes most of my favorite writers: Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis," Mr. Lin told WSJ. And now Tao Lin.

So here is some stuff that is not in The Wall Street Journal: The book was sold for $50,000 with a $10,000 bonus if it earns out its advance, with one-third up front, one-third upon delivery of the manuscript and one-third upon publication in the U.S. and Canada. The proposal consisted of a 5000-word excerpt and a ~3-page outline. The other houses that made offers were Harper Perennial and Little, Brown. Tim O'Connell, who is an associate editor at Vintage and Anchor Books, will edit Mr. Lin. Mr. O'Connell was described by his new author as a "prolific Tweeter." Mr. O'Connell has Tweeted four times since March 2010.

Here is the rest of our exchange with Mr. Lin:

NYO: Did you get to go to meetings at the publishing houses?

TL: Yes, I met with 4 editors.

NYO: Who has the nicest office?

TL: Bloomsbury had the bleakest office, in my view. The other offices were all really nice.

NYO: Did Tim make the highest offer or was he the editor (and Vintage the publisher) you liked best?

TL: I liked everyone. Vintage didn't make the highest offer. I liked them best, based on a number of factors and with Bill's input.

NYO: Did you meet Sonny Mehta?

TL: I did not, but Tim and I talked about him. Tim spoke to him a number of times. Sonny had asked Tim which book by me he should read and Tim had said "Richard Yates," so Sonny may have read some or all of "Richard Yates."

NYO: Were you counseled against putting out a book proposal when everyone is on vacation (did they say "wait until September" or did you have to talk with any editors on Martha's Vineyard)?

TL: Everyone seemed very available, but I think mostly because of Bill's influence and enthusiasm. Bill highly exceeded my expectations at what an agent does or could do.

NYO: Do you feel now like you've "made it"?

TL: I honestly feel, to a large degree, like me and everyone else are close to death and that the awareness of this has, to me, precluded thoughts of "making it" (this is a theme of the novel).

Tao Lin will have the superagent.

Last December, novelist Tao Lin published a to-do list for the year 2011 in Paper magazine.

"Gain literary agent representation from Bill Clegg for '120,000-word/concrete-literal memoir of Mar. 2009 to Dec. 2010 that uses real names and has a large, guidebook-like index," one of the wish-list entries read.

He anticipated this happening in September, but it looks like Mr. Lin is a bit ahead of schedule. He announced today on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook that Mr. Clegg will indeed be representing him on his next novel -- which may or may not be titled Siddhartha 2 -- with plans of publishing it in 2013. A representative for the agent confirmed to The Observer that Mr. Clegg has taken on Tao Lin as a client. The author currently has a "~5000-word excerpt with a ~2000-word outline" and his agent will be selling the novel based on that.

The new representation is a big step up for the cult novelist. Mr. Clegg turned year-long benders of crack cocaine and male prostitutes into acclaimed memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,  and before that represented A-list novelists such as Nicole Krauss, Susan Choi and Nick Flynn.

We signed onto Gmail chat, the preferred mode of communication for Tao and the characters in his novel, to talk about the new book and hotshot agent. We condensed and edited it for clarity, just like a Paris Review Art of Fiction interview.

Tao:  hey

The Observer:  hey. so you have a third novel that you're trying to sell. what's it about?

Tao: let me load my outline really quick for reference

The Observer:  ok cool

Tao:  hey. my macbook ran out of batteries, plugged back in

The Observer:  oh ok

Tao:  The novel is autobiographical and begins in 2009 when the protagonist is 25. It spans ~2.5 years and is set in Taiwan, NYC, Las Vegas. It contains a marriage, somewhat extreme recreational drug usage, parents, a book tour. It's written in a Lorrie Moore-esque prose style but denser, like my first story-collection but more refined. The protagonist in my 3rd novel experiences Siddhartha-like unhappiness and confusion. I feel attracted to titling it Siddhartha 2 but I'm not sure yet, I feel aversion toward that title in some ways.

The Observer:  Congrats on the new agent! when did you and bill get together

Tao:  I read and liked Bill Clegg's memoir last year and emailed him saying I liked it. He said he had read RICHARD YATES. He ended up doing a guest review of it on Amazon.

The Observer:  Yes, I read that review. He really liked it. I also read that you wanted to make a documentary about Bill Clegg. What was the idea behind that? Is it still happening?

Tao: My wife [novelist Megan Boyle] and I wanted to make a documentary about Bill Clegg. I think he said (modestly) that we could find someone more interesting to make a documentary about. I still feel interested in making a documentary about him. The idea behind it was just to follow him around for an amount of time and edit it into a documentary.

The Observer:  Yes. I think that would make for an interesting documentary. So about your new book. It sounds like the most ambitious thing you've done so far.

Tao:  It'll be more difficult to satisfactorily write than any of my previous books, I think. But I like writing in this style. If forced to describe the novel by comparing it to other things I'd say it's a combination of Lorrie Moore's prose style and tone, Bret Easton Ellis' sort of reckless and drug-using characters, and Siddhartha's continually unsuccessful, earnest attempts at some kind of peace or transcendence.

Tao:  i have ~20 min

The Observer:  OK. The references to Siddhartha are somewhat surprising, or at least I can't remember you mentioning it as an inspiration before. It makes sense, though. Did you reread it recently? The cult of that book has always intrigued me.

Tao:  I read it for the first time something like a year ago and really liked it, was affected by it. I was surprised. I had thought it would be different, that the protagonist wouldn't be so confused/lost.

The Observer:  Right. You mentioned immediately that this novel is autobiographical, but your last two novels were as well, no? Does the story of this one stay even closer to exact events in your life?

Tao:  Hm, I think the events/order will still, as in my previous two books, be secondary to what I want the novel's overall effect to be—it's not a memoir, and I'm willing to change events/ordering and am just using my memory as a gigantic, like 10,000,000 word, first draft—but my previous two books were concrete/literal and this book will be more abstract and have passages where I'm just like writing sentences about my feelings and thoughts, in a philosophic/lyrical manner, and those sentences will be pretty strictly just directly what I'm thinking/feeling, though in a worked-on form.

The Observer:  About Bill Clegg. He's a major literary agent, and well-known for his memoir. He'll probably sell your book to a major publishing house. Do you worry that you're alienating fans? Will they accuse you of "selling out?" On your facebook, Alec Niedenthal said "dude, where is your 'indie spirit'... just self-publish and title it Bill Clegg."

Tao:  When I finished my first story-collection, BED, in 2005, my goal was to sell it for like at least $20,000 so I could not have a job. I had agent interest from two agents. One was Curtis Sittenfeld's agent. For some reason I chose the other agent. He wasn't able to sell BED, which Melville House ended up publishing for a $1000 advance. Since then, since 2005, I've had jobs or done things like sold shares in RICHARD YATES or stolen batteries to sell on eBay or borrowed money from strangers. My average income from writing, per year, 2006 to now, is probably something like $7000. I'm glad I will hopefully finally have money to focus more on writing.

Tao: i have time for 1 more question

The Observer: OK. When do you expect to finish the book? When do you think it will come out?

Tao:  I expect to finish it Fall 2012, I think if I finish it then it'll come out in 2013, depending on what the publisher wants.

The Observer:  and how long do you think it will be?

Tao:  i want it to be short, Good Morning, Midnight or The Easter Parade-like, so between 50k and 60k words probably. I want it to be something I could almost memorize. okay, going afk [away from keyboard] now, will have iPhone if you have short follow-ups i will answer. thanks. good night.

The Observer:  good night? it's 1:00. are you not in New York?

Tao:  in spain actually

The Observer:  that's exciting. just for fun?

Tao:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ylhmjSv7Zo

no, publisher invited me. okay, afk for real now. have a nice day

The Observer:  ok, bye tao

Shakar.

There's a cautionary essay by the novelist Alex Shakar up at The Millions about all the ill-fated events that befell him after his first novel, The Savage Girl, got a giant advance a little over ten years ago. First Robert Jones, his beloved editor at HarperCollins, died of cancer at the age of 47. The memorial service was held eight days before the book was to be released, and one day before September 11, 2001. Not only did 9/11 cause everyone to declare Mr. Shakar's literary prediction of a post-ironic age irrelevant, but then his agent, "a clean-cut, preppie-looking guy" named Bill Clegg, turned out to be a crack addict.

And then there's our treatment of him:

The other event at an East Village bar that summer was a pre-launch party for the novel which Sharyn had arranged.

“Great news,” she said on the phone the morning thereof.  “It got picked up in the Observer.  They even ran an excerpt.”

It was the first piece of press the book had gotten.  On my way to the party, I bought a copy:

"How to market a book by a young Ivy League author whose prose thoroughly confuses you?  Compare him to Thomas Pynchon, cross your fingers and hope for the best, baby!"

This was followed by an out-of-context sentence from a sex scene.  Followed in turn by some other party one could go to instead.

Stricken, feeling like I’d been molested, I threw the paper away, took deep breaths, and entered the bar.  At every table, and spaced every three feet down the bartop, lay photocopies of the article.  A few early guests were perusing it.  Sharyn came up to me, a whole stack of them in hand.

Let it be known: all future debut novelists will be allowed to shoot the messenger when a sentence or two of snark comprises a palpable target in a world of cosmic misfortune. (Any Luminarium parties on the horizon?)

It was an issue that would have been good to square away before the memoir's publication. The fact that amends were never made would surely leave Mr. Clegg—who has been an agent at William Morris since his return to publishing four years ago—vulnerable to some pretty bad PR, when reporters writing potentially helpful fluff pieces started calling around asking questions.

So, in a meeting at Little, Brown offices with Mr. Clegg and agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Mr. Pietsch brought up the question of apologizing to Ms. Burnes. The expectation after that meeting was that Mr. Clegg would reach out to Ms. Burnes.

But the years-long silence from Mr. Clegg continued for at least a while longer, say two sources close to the situation: In a subsequent conversation with Ms. Burnes, Mr. Pietsch expressed dismay upon learning that Mr. Clegg still had not contacted her.

Ms. Burnes received an email from Mr. Clegg shortly afterward.

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, which Little, Brown published this week, recounts Mr. Clegg's double life as a literary golden boy and drug addict: His world of book parties and supportive relationships includes periodic breaks for crack and Ketel One in the high-end hotels of Manhattan. This balancing act falls apart over the course of an extended binge, wreaking both personal and professional havoc.

In the book, Mr. Clegg describes dissolving his business with Ms. Burnes—pregnant at the time and preparing to go on maternity leave—via email: "Before I press Send, I look out the window at the thick flakes of snow coming down in slow motion between the buildings and think I am doing her a favor. Giving her permission to get out and move on. I feel next to nothing as I end our partnership, our business, my career."

Burnes & Clegg, the boutique agency that the two had founded, shuttered. Their authors scrambled for new agents, and the new agents scrambled to make sense of Mr. Clegg's deals. Ms. Burnes went to the Gernert Company. After rehab, Mr. Clegg took a job with Ms. Walsh at William Morris Endeavor.

"Bill welcomed the opportunity to make amends," said Ms. Walsh, who is Mr. Clegg's agent as well as his boss. According to her account, Mr. Clegg only learned it was a possibility in the meeting, from Mr. Pietsch. She said that Mr. Clegg's previous understanding had been that Ms. Burnes wanted no contact with him, a wish that her lawyer had conveyed in the aftermath of their company's dissolution.

"It was unbelievably sympathetic," said Ms. Walsh of the conversation that took place with Mr. Pietsch. "It was not a ‘you should do this' by any stretch of the imagination."

Mr. Pietsch was on vacation and could not be reached. Neither Ms. Burnes nor her colleagues and the Gernert Company would comment; and in an email, Mr. Clegg declined, as he has every time anyone has asked, to speak about Ms. Burnes.

Mr. Clegg touches on the subject of amends and forgiveness only delicately in his memoir.

"There is a time, much later, when I imagine what it was like for everyone else, those who were by blood, accident, or inclination involved," he writes. "At first I'm consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly, with the help of kindred spirits, these feelings evolve, are still evolving, into something less self-concerned."

Mr. Abate was left to plan his next act when the merger was finalized at the end of April and it was confirmed that he wouldn't be joining the combined company's book operation in New York. That division will be run by longtime William Morris literary co-heads Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Suzanne Gluck when the merger receives governmental approval.

It was unclear at the time whether the squad Mr. Abate had built up at Endeavor over the past two years would follow him wherever he goes next. But according to a source with firsthand knowledge of the situation, he is saying goodbye to literary agents Kirby Kim and Rebecca Oliver, as well as his subsidiary rights manager, Laura Bonner, all three of whom have resolved to leave their old boss and have committed to joining up with the ladies at William Morris instead. Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Bonner joined Endeavor in the last year or so. Ms. Oliver has been there since May 2007.

As for the rest of Mr. Abate's people, it remains unclear what's next for Shawn Coyne, who has been with Endeavor since the fall of 2007, or Trena Keating, who was the editor in chief of Dutton before Mr. Abate brought her on as an agent in the fall of 2008.

Mr. Abate's plans, meanwhile, are anyone's guess at this point, though he is rumored to be in the process of forming his own agency.

All those involved either declined to comment or did not return emails from The Observer.

According to our source, who will be part of the combined WME Entertainment, no one from the William Morris literary department—which includes agents Bill Clegg, Wayne Kabak, Erin Malone, Jay Mandel, and Eric Simonoff—will be leaving the company.

Cheers! John Koblin reports that The New York Times will celebrate its own coverage of the Beijing Olympics with "Champagne and egg rolls to reward the 'stunning' coverage The Times produced on the Web, and in the newspaper..."

Publishers are clambering to put together books on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, reports Leon Neyfakh. Plus: After David Carr, Bill Clegg.

PLUS: Femocracy '08... What Has Happened to the Toronto Film Festival?... Ira Silverberg

Today, Pat Strachan of Little, Brown acquired the rights to Mr. Clegg's book, which is tentatively called Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. Ms. Walsh confirmed that Ms. Strachan had made the acquisition but declined to comment further. Mr. Clegg did not respond to an e-mail. 

Mr. Clegg was the subject of much concern and speculation within the publishing industry in 2005, when he abrupty stopped coming into work at the agency he ran at the time with Sarah Burnes, and left his clients—Nicole Krauss, Susan Choi, and Andrew Sean Greer among them—without representation. He resurfaced in 2006 as an agent at William Morris, where he has been ever since. It is widely understood that he was in recovery during the time he spent away from work.

UPDATE: A source says Ms. Walsh got Mr. Clegg a $350,000 advance for North American rights. According to an announcement, the book will be published in 2010.