“Muse”

By Jonathan Galassi

(Alfred A. Knopf, 258 pages, $25)

Jonathan Galassi’s keenly observed debut novel, “Muse,” is a carefully constructed literary echo chamber, haunted by the ghosts of two classics and peopled with some thinly veiled portraits of well-known publishing figures. As in Philip Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” a young man with literary aspirations — in this case, an editor instead of a writer — finds himself torn between two rival father figures. As in Henry James’ “The Aspern Papers,” an editor obsessed with a famous poet goes to Venice in search of some answers about the poet and the poet’s lover and has a surprising encounter that will affect both his career and his apprehension of himself.

Galassi — president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux — draws on his own longtime experience in the business to give readers a tactile portrait of the New York literary world in “the good old days,” when publishing was a gentlemanly profession.

The novel’s hero, Paul Dukach, often bears more than a passing resemblance to the author, while his competing mentors have clearly been inspired by two giants of 20th-century publishing: The profane, swaggering Homer Stern is recognizably based on Galassi’s own larger-than-life former boss at Farrar, Roger W. Straus Jr., while his patrician rival, Sterling Wainwright, has more than a little in common with James Laughlin, founder and longtime head of New Directions, renowned for publishing works by authors like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller and Tennessee Williams.

“Muse” is constructed around overlapping triangles: Paul finds his loyalties torn between his boss, Homer, and his mentor and friend, Sterling, two men who “cordially detested each other, and greatly enjoyed doing so.” Sterling, founder of the influential Impetus Editions regarded Homer, head of Purcell & Stern, as “a crass and ill-mannered upstart opportunist,” while “Homer derided Sterling as a playboy indulging his literary pretensions without any practical acumen or publishing savvy.”

Homer and Sterling are also engaged in an ancient rivalry over a writer they both zealously covet: one Ida Perkins.

These two triangles converge dramatically when Paul wins an audience with Ida in Venice and finds himself privy to an astonishing literary secret that could rock the publishing world and explode the life of one of his father figures.

In Ida, Galassi — who is himself an accomplished poet — has created an avatar of a vanished era in which poets could be huge celebrities and gives us some charming examples of her work. The problem is that Galassi so inflates Ida’s reputation and influence that he has trouble persuading us that she is a writer of such magnitude.

Or that her verse was so remarkable that Paul could plausibly declare that “Ida Perkins is to American poetry as Proust is to the French novel.”

This novel also struggles at first to get going — too many static, biographical asides about assorted characters’ class, genealogical and literary connections — but it gathers momentum as it progresses, providing us some telling glimpses of the publishing world that are a lot more incisive and succinct than those in “Hothouse,” Boris Kachka’s long-winded, over-the-top biography of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013).

At its best, “Muse” — much like John Updike’s early Bech books — leaves insiders with a knowing portrait of the publishing world before the digital revolution, and gives outsiders an entertaining, gently satirical look at the passions and follies of a vocation peopled by “fanatics of the cult of the printed word.”