Adrienne Brodeur has been a consulting
editor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt since 2005. She acquires fiction and memoir,
and her list of authors includes Dean Bakopoulos, Anita Desai, Bruce Machart,
Martha McPhee, Bharati Mukherjee and Peter Rock. She founded the fiction
magazine Zoetrope:
All-Story with filmmaker Francis Coppola
and served as its editor from 1995 to 2002, during which time the magazine won
the prestigious National Magazine Award for Best Fiction. She judged the
National Book Award in 2002. Her novel, Man Camp, was published by Random House in
2005.
Why and how did you pick The Wake of Forgiveness to publish?
I had gotten to know Bruce's work years earlier in 2001, when I published a tremendous story of his in Zoetrope: All-Story, the fiction magazine I founded with Francis Coppola. Cut to five years later. I had just started working for Harcourt and I saw "Bruce Machart" on a manuscript box--yes, it was that recently that manuscripts arrived in boxes and not electronically. The box had a nice heft and I was excited to read his work again. I breezed past the letter from his agent, which I swear didn't mention that the novel was a partial. Anyway, I became totally absorbed as I read--I didn't want to eat, didn't want to talk to my husband, didn't want to do anything but keep reading. Then I got to page 97 and the novel abruptly stopped. I was devastated! Tucked neatly behind it was a collection of short stories entitled Men in the Making, which is also brilliant and we will publish next year. I called the agent, and she confirmed there were only 97 pages. Even so, I knew that I wanted to buy it. Initially, there were some reservations internally about buying an unfinished novel by an unknown author, but when the finished manuscript arrived several years later, everyone recognized what a marvel it was.
What's it like to work with Bruce?
He's a dream, a perfectionist. Right away when you read his work--as an editor or as a "regular" reader, for that matter--you relax into the experience, knowing that you are in the hands of an extremely talented writer who knows exactly where he's going to take you.
Any challenges in editing the novel?
Well... The Wake of Forgiveness is a challenging and complicated novel on many levels. Consider the tenses alone, and how Bruce navigates time. My red pencil was often poised above the page, but 99% of the time, Bruce got it right. I did make suggestions along the way, of course, but mostly on a story level. I did very little in the way of line editing. I didn't mess with his prose. I have since heard the stray complaint or two that Bruce's sentences can be long and complicated, but when you consider all that they convey and how beautifully they do it, I challenge anyone to improve upon them.
Bruce would often threaten to deliver a section to me in a "rough state," but the fact is, he never did. How I would know that something was amiss was that he'd miss a deadline. Later, I would learn that he'd taken a wrong turn and had to toss 116 pages, but I was rarely part of that process. What he sent me was always very polished, which is, in the end, what every editor wants.