Don’t call him the Jackal. “The Jackal thing doesn’t interest me,” he had told another interviewer, and I didn’t want to bore him. Andrew Wylie, 75, is the agent around whom the New York literary world has had to orient itself for four decades now. His pugnacious reputation as the man who holds publishers to ransom and snatches prized authors from other agents precedes him. Talk to him and you will soon realise he values two qualities in people: how much they have read, and whether they are amusing.
How amusing you find Wylie may depend on how dark you like your humour: “Perhaps the industry has made peace with Amazon. But it’s a little bit like saying that the Uyghurs are getting along well with the Chinese… When you’re driving down the highway and you see a horrific car accident, it’s not a sight you want to linger on, and yet you do slow down and look. That’s how I feel about life in America these days… The only noble enterprise seems to be Ukraine and the US will soon pull the plug and Putin will hang everyone by their feet.”
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