A Bookworm Who Knows How to Read Writers : Radio: Erudite and conversational, interviewer Michael Silverblatt tunes in to authors and uncovers what makes them tick.

Near the end of a radio interview, Joyce Carol Oates, queen of the dark Gothic in American letters, turned to KCRW-FM’s “Bookworm” almost accusingly. “You are the ideal reader,” she said, her plain, flat voice incredulous. “You’re the reader that all writers postulate but never dare assume exists. You read not with your eye to see what happens, but with your ear, to hear what happens.”

It was a landmark moment. Words fly from Michael Silverblatt like feathers from a torn pillow, piling up like snowdrifts around his subjects. But for once Silverblatt, the Bookworm, had nothing to say.

He conducts his interviews in an intense, hypnotic murmur, larding them with a staggering range of references: books, poetry, myth, popular music, puns, jokes, puzzles, sometimes simply a wiseacre’s shot in the dark. Terry Gross’ smart, genial interviews on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” may make her authors themselves accessible, but Silverblatt seems to fly past all that, to fix on the throat of the writing itself.

By telephone from Connecticut, author-artist Maurice Sendak recollected his two, back-to-back “Bookworm” interviews: “Michael is so intensely personal. He just thrusts his way through any superficial preliminaries into the heart of the work. His erudition is mind-boggling. He’s thought of everything. He’s read everyone. He’s funny. He has immense subtlety of mind and entirely original ideas. Probably the best interview I’ve ever had.”

Slouching thoughtfully on a couch in his pin-neat, Fairfax-district apartment, Silverblatt elaborated. “People magazine wants us to know how writers are like everyone else. The Bookworm believes that writers are utterly different from other people. They see things differently, they remember things differently. For me, there are phrases that have lodged in my mind like splinters, hundreds of phrases, and learning how those phrases came to be is what I’d like to know.”

Silverblatt’s quarry on his 1:30 p.m. Tuesday show is the serious poet or writer. His method is immersion in the writer’s work--all of it, not just the book at hand--and a truly conversational style. When the show is cooking, when Scott Turow explains what he learned from Tillie Olsen, or when Gore Vidal in his Orson Welles rumble unleashes his pyrotechnic opinions, it is verbal art, an aural Balanchine duet, all intertwinings and balances.

“My intention with writers is creating a rapt atmosphere,” Silverblatt said, pushing aside one of the books that dominate his living room. “Most writers are not thinkers; they’re word users and words hold whatever key there is to the writer’s thought processes. If you start to talk to a writer in his speech, it’s like talking to a Spaniard in Spanish. Suddenly the writer begins speaking in his own tongue, at his deepest level. It induces the writer into the half-dreamlike reverie which is like being at his writing desk.”

To novelist Ann Beattie, her own generation’s most melancholy and witty voice, it’s Silverblatt’s unprotected air that sets him apart. By telephone from Maine, she commented: “Most people as astute as he is wouldn’t let you in on their vulnerability. Their intelligence would be their power. But Michael wants a real exchange, so he will risk it. Frankly, some of his references go right by me, but you know with him there’s never any condescension, even implied.”

Does he admire every writer he has on the show? “I’m not a fan of Anne Rice’s,” he said, “but I try not to let my feelings have free play, and I had an idea listeners wanted to hear her. I was amazed by three things she said: She writes in something like a trance, she could not possibly write quickly enough and she would never want to write a perfect book. It’s like turning on a hose; she likes it to flow like spray.

“When I asked her if she liked ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ dense and worked out, mysterious and ambiguous, she said ‘The Turn of the Screw’ bored her. And I had to admire her because she did know her gift, which is a kind of exuberant lathering of the subject. She writes like Niagara, and there will be, when the light hits that torrent, random rainbows. She’s not in control, but the rainbows are there, nonetheless.”

That there is a Bookworm was one of those flukes on which life fortunately turns. KCRW general manager Ruth Hirschman had always wanted a book show for the station, but never found the right voice for it. Two-and-a-half years ago, she met Silverblatt when he was, haplessly, in public relations. At a dinner table, with movie talk flowing around them, the two found themselves passionately discussing Russian poets. Hirschman decided she had just met her Bookworm.

Having known Silverblatt from even earlier days, I’m not sure I would have had Hirschman’s certainty. A microphone can paralyze as easily as it can liberate. Witness the coffee-house savants who give virtuoso performances for dozing waiters, then freeze up in front of an audience.

Instead, the person who once sighed, “The best thing I knew how to do was read,” discovered a front man for his lifelong passion. “Bookworm is a kind person, kinder than I am,” Silverblatt said laughing wildly, “who wants to know about and worships writers. I love the Bookworm, because he is, more than anything else, an appreciator. “ Hirschman likes the Yiddish word kavannah , purity of intention, for the quality Silverblatt projects.

The show itself is a Los Angeles prize, driving even New York editors to un-New York-like displays of envy: Puttnam’s Faith Sale (who edited “The Joy Luck Club,” among others) describes “The Bookworm” as the best reader and author program there is, adding plaintively, “Why don’t we have it?”

“Right now,” Silverblatt said cheerfully, “Los Angeles has some of the best new writers in America. Bernard Cooper, whose first book, ‘Maps to Anywhere’ just won the Hemingway Award. The poet Amy Gerstler, whose ‘Bitter Angel’ won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Judith Freeman, who wrote ‘Chinchilla Farm’ and whose astounding new novel ‘Set for Life’ is just about to be published. Dennis Cooper, who has two novels, ‘Closer’ and his new one, ‘Frisk.’ Erica Taylor, whose first novel, ‘The Sun Maiden’ is about to come out.

“That a literary community like the one that surrounded me in college could form here is enormously important. For my part, I want to provide Los Angeles with an example of the kind of literary conversation that I found around writers in New York when I was in my teens and 20s, conversation that seems to have died out everywhere.”

Where does he find support for that optimism?

“I think Richard Eder is the genuine article, a real reader and thinker. He is the rare book reviewer whose subtlety repays re-reading, but the fact that he doesn’t live in Los Angeles leaves a hole. He’s not plumping for the Los Angeles scene. Michiko Kakutani, who’s the New York Times’ daily fiction critic, is courted all over New York. If Eder were to appear at a Los Angeles reading, this is a form of encouragement a young writer can live on for months.”

It seems that Silverblatt himself can now be encouragement of the most positive sort. In a city almost famous for its anti-literary attitude, “The Bookworm” thrives, putting reading in a defiantly user-friendly light, cherishing the very act of writing. With his recent post as director of literary acquisitions for an extremely viable production company, Silverblatt can encourage writers tangibly.

“My life now is like the wonderland I always dreamed of inhabiting,” he said. “I get to stay at home and read and talk to writers--it’s so close to the perfect life for a bookworm that sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind myself I’m working.”