Editor Paul Slovak on The Angel of Forgetfulness

Paul Slovak is the vice president and associate publisher of Viking. As an editor, he’s worked with writers like Steve Stern (author of The Angel of Forgetfulness, our LBC Autumn Read This! pick), William T. Vollmann, and T.C. Boyle. (The LBC even has it on good authority that Boyle introduced Slovak to his wife.) He also serves on the board of the Center for Book Culture, which is responsible for the Dalkey Archive as well as the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Here Slovak talks about his history working with Stern and the experience of editing The Angel of Forgetfulness.

I thought perhaps it might be best for me to talk a little bit about my history working with Steve Stern, and my editing role on the new book. I’ve been working at Viking Penguin since 1983, and in 1986 we published his story collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. I was then a publicist and I did the publicity on the book, and I suppose what most struck me then were three things -- his miraculous, one of a kind sentences, “sentences to die for” as a reviewer for the Washington Post put it; his ability to marry realism with fantasy, and the entertainment value of his stories, the sheer pleasure they provide to the reader (he is not unlike T.C. Boyle in that regard). Steve’s then-editor left Viking and he kind of fell off the map for a little while, but a collection of his novellas was published by Scribner in 1994 and his editor at Scribner came to run Viking and when she left, well before Angel was turned in, I took over as Steve’s editor. Despite good intentions I hadn’t really looked at any of his other work.

I can’t really say there was any kind of shift in how I experienced his writing as I moved from being the publicist to the editor – he was still same Steve Stern, with the same magical prose and the same delirious imagination. I knew right away that this was the most ambitious thing he had ever attempted and that made the novel a lot of fun to edit. I had seen portions of the novel in earlier drafts and given feedback, some two years before the final manuscript was delivered, so I knew what he was up to and where he was going and when it came in it was already in pretty good shape; he’s a pro and I would have been surprised if it wasn’t. To be honest I suppose as someone who was always a bit disappointed to have been too young to truly be a part of the 1960s (I was born in 1956) I was most drawn initially to Saul’s story, and was really pleased that Steve had the idea of marrying that to the original kernel of the novel (Mocky’s tale). 

The manuscript was long, and I suppose the most significant work we did on the book was some trimming here and there, some of which I specifically recommended to him and some of which he did on his own at my prompting. In regards to the narrative structure, I marveled in general at how well he kept all those balls in the air; I did point out to him some places where I as a reader got a little bogged down or where the action slowed down a bit. There were many other smaller queries and suggestions which I scribbled into the margins of the manuscript. So it was a three page or so editorial letter and a long working lunch and that was all we needed. 

I probably did a little more work on Steve’s manuscript that I would do on T.C. Boyle or William Kennedy or Maureen Howard (all of whom hand in manuscripts that are very clean and need little work) or William T. Vollmann (now there’s a guy who likes to have free rein as an author, though I have managed with a couple of his books to save a few trees) – but not that much more. When you have someone who writes as well as Stern does it makes the job a little easier. I take a lot of enjoyment in editing; first novels in particular, when you might have three or four passes, can be a great learning experience for both an author and an editor. I also edit a lot of nonfiction and that presents its own challenges. As for whether editors still function in the hands-on way, I personally know a lot of editors who do; I also hear the stories of the editors who pass books along to assistants to be edited, who don’t edit books very closely or thoroughly or passionately. That’s not the way I work.

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