Years ago I read an obituary of the last human on Earth who could navigate the open ocean entirely by reading the natural landscape. Pius “Mau” Piailug could wayfind entirely by studying birds and fishes and stars, winds and smells, the rhythm of the swells of the waves. This particular death haunted me beyond measure. I felt a mix of wonder and nausea thinking that an entire way of knowing the world could be contained inside one single person and then be gone in one instant. The rest of us are left here looking at the same drifting clouds, the same stars, the same birds, in various states of partial but mostly inept comprehension.
The miracle of holding a galaxy of details in one single brain, to see meaning, entanglement, and instruction knitted across that vastness—it’s one way to explain the singularity of Michael Silverblatt, who hosted Bookworm, on KCRW, from 1989 until 2022. Silverblatt died last week at age 73, and we have in that one instant lost our greatest reader.
Anyone who thinks that sounds overheated has not, I suspect, encountered any of the 48,000+ minutes of conversations Silverblatt recorded across the decades with every canonical English language writer imaginable. There he is speaking with Toni Morrison about the human capacity to love under duress; celebrating John Ashbery’s poetry as an “exchange of incomprehensions” and agreeing they are both “happiest in the forest where things lose their names”; offering such a generous reading of Infinite Jest that David Foster Wallace was prompted to ask if Silverblatt would adopt him. He was the rare interviewer to loosen up the taciturn W. G. Sebald—it’s the most animated I think I ever heard Sebald sound, as he and Silverblatt begin rhapsodizing at length about the fog in Bleak House, in what tragically turned out to be one of the final public conversations of Sebald’s life.
Woven into Silverblatt’s genius was a vulnerability unusual for a serious critic and reader. In one of several talks with Booker Prize finalist David Mitchell, Silverblatt notes how they both grew up with a stammer, and tentatively ventures that:
Stammering is the language of the inner self. And it’s learning how to say what you have to, in disregard to anyone’s impulse to laugh at you for not knowing already how to say what you need to know. Don’t you think . . . that we all stammer? That is to say before we encounter truth, before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say?
A silence follows as both writer and listener breathe in this tender offering. Then Mitchell responds, “You’ve done it again, Michael. That’s more observant and articulate of what I’m doing in my book than I could ever match.” Nearly every interview has an astonished writer saying something to this effect.
Perhaps as a result of that childhood stammer, Silverblatt always spoke in a gentle, tiptoe cadence, not only on radio, but in the sprawling messages that filled my voice mailbox through the years, always beginning the same way: “Jynne, it’s Michael Silverblatt calling. I miss talking with you. Could you give me a call back.”
I entered book publishing at a wild technological inflection point: in the late 1990s, media clippings were xeroxed and dropped by industrious assistants into wire inboxes (yes, I speak of a physical object called an “inbox”), and updated author schedules were faxed to hotels so that Zadie Smith et al could bypass the line for the computer terminal in the hotel lobby, where they would have otherwise had to wait to find out what interviews had been added over the preceding forty-eight hours. Email attachment capacities were so limited that filing cabinets housed hundreds of 8×10 author photos that would be FedExed to, say, the books desk of the Chicago Tribune to get scanned and printed alongside a review. (No comment on whether there’s any connection between these filing cabinets and the smoking hot Paul Auster photo, circa early 1980s, on my home bulletin board.) And even as email mushroomed into widespread use and began to be accepted by the elders as a normal form of communication, “call sheets” for publicists were named that for a painful reason. The expectation was that we’d cold call hundreds of media contacts all day long about upcoming publications, an endurance sport that hovers somewhere between the third and fourth ring of hell for an introvert.
In the face of the Brian De Palma–level horror film that was 23-year-old me trying to “work the phones” came a single, solitary respite: Michael Silverblatt. Here was a kindly and eccentric soul who, instead of brusquely hanging up or telling me I had thirty seconds to spit out my pitch, wanted to engage in an extended chat about not only the book I was calling about, but everything else I loved to read in my increasingly nonexistent free time. Our conversations never lasted less than an hour and soon began stretching into entire afternoons, covering favorite Szymborska lines, why I was wrong about Dostoyevsky, Jungian motifs and how the world doesn’t approve of people on quests, and which passages in Remains of the Day about the tragedy of the inexpressible had made us both cry.
Was this what I was hired to do? Most certainly not, though it was closest my early-career workdays ever came to my teenage fantasies of what a life in book publishing might be like. I had not imagined a hellhole of literary phonebanking, much less that the job would require putting on a giant rat suit to hand out copies of Who Cut the Cheese?1 to bankers on Wall Street, or feeding Jane Fonda’s tiny dog organic Whole Foods chicken that I myself could not afford. I hadn’t dreamt of panicked late-night calls from authors about the hotel hot water not working, O’Hare airport delays, or the most evil technological development of all: real-time news website updates that in turn carried real-time make-or-break book reviews. Instead of discovering a critical review in the morning’s print newspaper, I would now be subjected to Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times book column of nuclear destruction online at 9 PM the night before, thus destroying a night’s sleep for both me and my distraught writer.
The wild complexities and stresses of bringing a book into the world came to a head at Thursday sales meetings at the office, where we received stapled pages of Excel grids tracking account sell-in and exhortations about all the additional publicity we needed to deliver, occasionally accompanied by screaming and tears. It was an era where media was ubiquitous, glamorous, formidably powerful, and all of it had a staggering impact on book sales: NPR’s Fresh Air could put a novel on the bestseller list, an Esquire feature could launch an entire career, and James Frey lying to Oprah about his memoir was a three-alarm, A1 news sensation. To be on the cover of the New York Times Book Review was the highest visibility imaginable—I look back with great nostalgia on the years I hung every TBR cover featuring one of my books on my office door, like so many racoon tails on a mantle. Through all this evolving high-stakes publishing chaos would come the same balmy, leisurely voicemails from Silverblatt. Mostly it was an indulgent relief to shut the office door and phone him back; but I am ashamed to admit that at times I would avoid his calls for days and even weeks, overwhelmed by my workload and unable to fathom how I could fit in a two-hour discussion of Lucie Brock-Broido’s newest poem in the New Yorker. I can still hear the tremor of hurt and excessive apologies for taking up my time whenever I cut a conversation short. His laconic style, even in that heyday of voluminous literary interview opportunities—Jon Stewart and Charlie Rose and Studio 360 and Dinner Party Download—seemed to belong to another century. He required, and rewarded, patience.
Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and then collapsing, newspapers going online-only and then vanishing altogether, glossy magazines ceasing print or, again, vanishing altogether, only Michael Silverblatt remained unchanged.
He continued to refuse to use email: all interviews were discussed, arranged, and confirmed by phone only. He most certainly did not join social media. As BuzzFeed ushered in the listicle era of “37 Plot Twists That Will Blow Your Mind!” and “24 Book-To-Movie Adaptations That Were So Bad They Inspired Rage,” there was Silverblatt still insisting on reading an author’s entire oeuvre before each interview. “I’ll need copies of Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Discontent and Its Civilizations.” “Could you send me Caucasia, Symptomatic, and You Are Free by Friday?”
A 704-page Marlon James novel containing dozens of characters speaking Jamaican patois and mesolectal variants? A famous longform NPR host I will not name declined this interview opportunity: A Brief History of Seven Killings was deemed far too lengthy a novel to read for a major NPR interview. Even after James won the Booker Prize, I was sent the same apologetic decline. Silverblatt, on the other hand, was ecstatic, raving about the acrobatics of language, structure, and explosive possibilities of fiction unleashed by Marlon James and his ultra-modern writing. But I should not throw shade on the unnamed radio host. Even were one to read all 704 pages of A Brief History of Seven Killings, as well as James’s full backlist, and to prepare as diligently as one could for an hour-long conversation, who besides Silverblatt could keep pace with James volleying in a matter of minutes between bestiality, Donald Barthelme, and the invention of homophobia?
Despite being the most well-read individual on the planet, Silverblatt infused every conversation with a startling degree of humility. The most profound observations, equally on the phone and on the radio, would be prefaced with “I don’t know quite how to put it . . .” or “I wonder if this will make sense . . .” Then out would tumble some staggering and perfectly sculpted insight. Did literature teach him the potency and power of such a humble mind, or did humility and curiosity lead him to read so widely and voraciously?
One great gift of humility is familiarity, perhaps even ease, with the experience of being lost. Silverblatt’s death has me thinking about how we are increasingly accustomed to having our bearings at all times. How will messier, more complicated texts find their readers? Who will navigate us through the forests where things have lost their names? In a beautiful exchange with the poet Mary Ruefle, Silverblatt talks about losing and finding his way in a text as a form of breathing: the rhythm of being lost and then finding your footing as a textual exhale and inhale, a pleasure to trust and surrender to that rhythm.
Technological innovations far more insidious than the fax machine have cannibalized attention spans, and corporate greed and insidious political pressures have decimated the media outlets that historically helped readers discover serious books that would blow their minds. (See this month’s bloodbath at the Washington Post, whose phenomenal Book World was shut down with no notice, and CBS pulling the plug on Stephen Colbert.) But as Silverblatt would be the first to say, the writers of those books haven’t given up or ceded their ambition. They continue to write and publish risky and challenging and transporting literature, even as we all continue to rely on a media and internet landscape that is increasingly degraded. Next year, Riverhead Books, where I work, is publishing a virtuosic 600-page debut novel with a wild cast of characters that takes on the dense networks of industry and infrastructure that remade this country and the acts of resistance and sabotage that have come to be named terrorism. It’s a free-wheeling, funny, sexy, and intensely subversive constellation novel. It also requires an ease with being lost, and rewards the intrepid reader by reorienting you in astonishing ways. But who is left in the Dogue2 and Free Press rubble of our literary and media landscape to champion such an ambitious book? Silverblatt is the first person I would have sent such a manuscript to twenty-five years ago. This year, he was the last person remaining who I know would have jumped at the chance to read it.
For those somehow not familiar, this was a blindingly witty parody of the 1998 megahit Who Moved My Cheese? ↩
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