The Reader

“If you have a book in your hand,” writes the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, “no matter how difficult to understand that book may be, when you have finished it, you can . . . go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well.”

The passage is just the wriggling tip of one of Pamuk’s famously expansive, vexingly serpentine thoughts: life and art and their shared chambered properties.

Can a life be closely scrutinized then rewritten like a text? Will complexity ultimately yield clarity?

At 9 a.m., it might be a little too rich a menu for most to digest, or even to pick at. But not for Michael Silverblatt, 44, producer and host of the weekly literary show “Bookworm” on KCRW-FM (89.9). The Bookworm likes puzzles, he assures the wiry and bespectacled Pamuk, who has flown in to Los Angeles for mere hours expressly to sit and let Silverblatt pause over his prose--his novel “The New Life.”

Silverblatt has been living with and in Pamuk’s words for days. Truth be told, the Bookworm admits days later, he’d forgone sleep to finish the last bites at 5:30 a.m.

Nothing in Silverblatt’s aspect suggests that he’d just pulled the classic all-nighter. He’s not a jumble of trembles, the victim of a system shot through with too much caffeine. He’s not loaded down with notebooks, crib notes; nor is the author’s volume defaced by the reader’s scrawled illuminations, half-thought-out inquiries. Instead, his tall frame is pared down to basics: black Levi’s faded to that post-punk-near-gray, black collarless shirt punctuated with white buttons, an oversized black blazer, and a pair of trendy well-worn black-and-white suede sneaks--Skechers.

“The show is low-impact and gentle,” he assures Pamuk, settling into a parlor chair next to him in the station’s on-deck space, the Red Room. “I treat the show as if the listeners are readers, you see,” Silverblatt explains in his whisper of a voice; fingers to the lenses, he pushes his rectangle frames higher on the bridge of his nose, “so, we can be as elusive and wide-ranging as you like.”

But it isn’t until Pamuk is ensconced in the studio, behind the hexagon table upon which Silverblatt has arranged the writer’s translated oeuvre before him, tape rolling--does the author begin to flow, relax with the words.

“Now, every once in a while a book will begin with a description of reading and I’ll know that I am in the right place,” Silverblatt announces into the microphone. “The book says something that I, at least, agree with--that a book should offer you as an adult the promise and pleasure that books seem to promise in childhood. But could you describe that pleasure of childhood books?”

Pamuk smiles, his voice finds its rhythm. “The pleasure of childhood books when you immerse yourself in them is that you totally manage to forget the outside world . . . things outside . . . totally disappear when you read them.” Pamuk’s eyes flicker, a connection made; his arms raise above his head--he begins to shape worlds with his hands. “So . . . although we know that they are not reality, we believe in them as if they were more real than reality.”

“Yes,” the host nods, drawing in a breath. “And so when a book lives both inside you and outside you, when a book colonizes you,” he pauses, the two men tethered by a nascent thought, “this is when you start to know that you’re in the presence of enchantment.”

*

The more knotty, the more oblique and metaphorical the text, the more heartily welcomed by the Bookworm. Maybe because the knowledge feels unearthed? Or because the fruits have roots in something rich and real, and so--like lessons in life--they feel precious and hard won?

“You might have to listen on tippy-toe,” he says a few days later, acknowledging some of the casual scuttlebutt ranging from laudatory to stinging that whips around the city about the show and its host’s rarefied tastes and erudite demeanor, but isn’t that part of elevating thought, expanding the purview--Silverblatt would offer in retort?

Now airing Thursday afternoons at 2:30, the half-hour show premiered eight years ago, the whim of KCRW’s general manager, Ruth Seymor.

“I had just gotten back from Russia, and we were at this dinner with an actor, a producer and director who were talking Hollywood,” Seymor recalls. “And Michael and I got into this whole discussion about Russian poetry, talking to the exclusion of everyone else. He’s a great raconteur and so the rest of the world just vanished. . . . So afterward I just turned and asked him: ‘Have you ever thought about doing radio?’ ”

A few months later, Silverblatt became an unlikely host for an unlikely show, in a city that is beyond annoyed by its undeserved reputation for provincialism.

Since then, the show has offered a last electronic outpost for often hard-to-promote and / or neglected literary fiction. Its aural watermark: an on-air texture that feels at times like eavesdropping on a refined world of ideas tossed about in wood-paneled University Club, or a giggling insider talk between two old friends--the rest of the world fallen away.

“He has very rarefied kinds of tastes and his show’s reputation is that it’s the very best radio venue that a literary author can get,” says Liz Calamari, deputy director of publicity at Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York. “He can be kind of prickly. But I think he asks very incisive questions. [He and authors] butt heads on his show sometimes, but that makes for an interesting show.”

Pam Henstell, L.A. publicity representative for Knopf, agrees. “He’s the subject of a lot of conversations around here. And in much the same way that books are sold word-of-mouth, he’s sold word-of-mouth.”

That air of dramatic possibility is what attracts writers of such diverse preoccupations, styles and idiosyncrasies--from the tangled racial territories that novelist Susan Straight divines to the high-gloss legal worlds that Scott Turow mines:

“Michael Silverblatt is the kind of person who will immerse himself in your world, because he knows just how hard it is to create those worlds,” Straight says. “He will love your book enough to stay up all night to finish it. He wants to hear what you have to say, because he wants to know himself. Not just because it is his job.”

Turow has weathered enough cursory interviews to appreciate the difference. “For me, because I’m a best-selling author, people don’t get much beyond the plot. That’s how I knew I was being taken seriously with Michael. He was dealing with the layers that he saw there.”

It’s that dual sensitivity that allows Silverblatt to wield so much power, believes West Coast literary agent Sandra Dijkstra. “There is a depth to Michael’s understanding. Sometimes he can be absolutely maddening because he knows what he wants to do. But it is important that he has taste, because in this age of mass-marketed tastes, he has his own and people respect that.”

Now aired in 40 cities across the nation and funded by a grant from the Lannan Foundation, “Bookworm” has built a following of people who stall their lunch or horde their nicotine breaks until late in the afternoon so that they might hear whose body of work Silverblatt’s chosen to dissect this week--John Irving? Susan Sontag? David Foster Wallace? Diane Johnson? Jamaica Kincaid? Junot Diaz? Art Spiegelman (who has, as a thank you, gifted the show with a new logo)?

He’s most certainly altered some other practices locally, “To the point,” says Doug Dutton, owner of Dutton’s Books in Brentwood, “that we are now watching KCRW’s program guide to get books by the authors Michael’s interviewing in stock. What will often happen is people will call on their cell phone and say: ‘I’m listening to Michael Silverblatt. Do you have a copy of ‘Angela’s Ashes’ by this Irish author? Because if you do, I’m on my way.’ ”

*

All this makes Silverblatt shrug like a shy kid still dubious of the weight of praise.

Maybe because he worries too about the other side of power--celebrity. Nagging, blooming rumor. Strained-at-the-seams friendships. Impatient locals who wonder why they haven’t been tapped for the show. Or maybe it’s his reputation for sometimes stumping his guests with a question they find too obtuse or oblique.

“Frankly, I’m a little scared of the guy,” admits one local writer who has appeared on the show, speaking anonymously. “I don’t understand half the things that he says. And the more arcane and cryptic he can be, it seems, the more he can throw people off base and get the upper hand. There’s a real Vincent Price element to this. . . .”

Sometimes, Silverblatt admits, “The show might sound like gauze and fairy dust.” His thought is broken by a slap on the cement outside, the first of the day’s deliveries to his Fairfax district apartment. Not quite library, not quite museum, more curiosity shop, it is busy with trinkets, colorful stimuli. Spines of floor-to-ceiling books line the wall like a mosaic of end papers. There are puzzles. Plush toys perch on shelves and fill an overstuffed chair. Tin wind-up toys muster in loose formation near the window. A Curious George jack-in-the-box shares a high shelf burdened with fiction.

“I wish people didn’t feel that way about being on the show. I guess most people feel that way until they do it,” says Silverblatt, tucking his knees beneath him, settling at the center of the floor, tearing through brown paper. “This is not shock radio. My job is to offer the writers a comfortable enough environment to talk about their work. Oftentimes on these tours, the last thing they get to talk about is their book. . . . Especially those . . . you don’t see on the front page of the book review [section]. If a bookworm lives in fear,” says Silverblatt in a self-referential moment, “it’s that these small presses and books will disappear.”

To find those names that might not otherwise float to the surface of our consciousness, Silverblatt embarks on careful investigative work--combing small-press catalogs, calling book distributors and editors to find what’s of interest, reading literary journals, keeping track of literary prizes.

Equally painstaking is his show-to-show preparation.

“In general I try to read the author’s complete work.” The admission slips out quickly, his tone matter-of-fact. “That’s not always true, and I never say it if it isn’t true. But more often than not, I have, at least, read the majority of the work. And sometimes it’s a superhuman challenge.”

One as well for the person on the other side of the microphone, if he or she hasn’t dipped into the backlist for a while. Something along the lines of a “cold shower” attests novelist and critic Carolyn See: “I felt that I was back taking my PhD orals. There he was asking me about my novels and I had no clue. Then he was comparing [her memoir] ‘Dreaming’ to ‘El Cid,’ and I’m thinking what the hell does ‘Dreaming’ have to do with ‘El Cid’? But there must be a connection because Michael found it. Holy God, you don’t want to sound like a moron on the ‘Bookworm’! I was hoping for the best. Personally I know he’s the nicest person on Earth. But I kept thinking he was thinking, ‘Here’s another one who flunked.’ ”

*

There is something remarkably anachronistic about the rigor and reverence with which Silverblatt approaches the written word. He believes in the importance of the subtly drawn, quietly told story, one that comes from a remote place.

As a young reader, Silverblatt traveled to those remote places far from his family’s crowded Brooklyn apartment. He was often spotted around his neighborhood, nose in book, trudging through the streets, seldom looking up lest he’d break the spell.

“A book about English children in a castle,” he tugs E. Nesbit’s “The Enchanted Castle” from a short pile near the couch, “that was the training, when I was young, to imagine a world that didn’t include me. Books and television are our cultural mirrors,” says Silverblatt, offering up analysis, “and when you look into the mirror and you don’t see your face, this is possibly a nightmare situation--the act of looking but not finding yourself, or looking and finding yourself where you don’t belong. So until I found books that had a Michael in them, part of me didn’t fully yet exist.”

But when a familiar image emerged from out of the margins, it was like being startled by a shadow.

“When I learned that there were [such] books--Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Henry Roth, that generation of Jewish writer--my first impulse was to resist. ‘This isn’t the castle!’ I was frightened. It was the language I heard around the house. If you’re any kind of minority, to open a book and hear the people around you, your aunts and uncles talking to you . . . that that language should be in a book? I mean, this is an enormous day!”

But by college he was consumed again, by the world of the experimental and the avant-garde. Enrolling as an English major at the flagship campus of the State University of New York system, in Buffalo. “I became fascinated by those authors--Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, the world of international modernism and postmodernism. Kafka and Thomas Mann and Joyce. John Hawkes, Ishmael Reed.”

Here, Silverblatt understood, was the world of the possibility. The writings said: “Anything could happen in a novel, that it wasn’t just in children’s books that you found a castle. It was the entrance of the possible into an imaginary world, into the day-to-day. Buffalo said to me essentially that you could live in the world, be educated--and the idea that you would end up teaching . . . was not a predetermined fate.”

But graduation saw Silverblatt’s hopes wilt; that protracted world of possibility folded in on itself.

“I wanted very badly to be a writer,” Silverblatt admits. “It’s something I still dream about.” He left graduate school with little other plan than not wanting to teach. “I worked for a while in a hotel as a desk clerk. You can imagine how unhappy everyone [at home] was about that. I was getting a PhD and ‘Now he’s working as a desk clerk.’ No one knew what was going to become of me.”

A co-authored screenplay project presented an exotic, unexpected opportunity; he grabbed at the chance and flew west. “But of course the movie didn’t get made, and you fight with your partner and I didn’t have enough responsibility to do it on my own,” he recalls. “And I’d just entered a bleak period of depression and part-time bookstore jobs for minimum wage, and that terrible sense where you don’t know who you are. I was living in such a delusory universe. See, fantasy is bad enough, but the mixture of fantasy and depression? There is no reality.”

It was in this isolated noisy place that Silverblatt, blocked, searching for a transition, momentarily wrote a new text for his life. He passed along some poems of a friend as his own to an editor, who liked them enough to publish them. Silverblatt agreed, with this provision: “Publish under my pen name--Charles Baxter.”

It was only when Baxter (who declined to be interviewed for this story) wanted to pen a thank you that Silverblatt revealed the secret.

“It’s terribly tragic,” he says now from the vantage of 16 years. “Charlie was a friend. I screwed up. I angered and alienated a lot of people. How does one explain something as inexplicable as erasing yourself to be someone else? That was some time ago.”

Even still, Silverblatt acknowledges, piecing the fragments together, it is a work in progress, this fleshing-out of character, this art of autobiography.

It was in the first stages of his rebuilding state--fragile, still floating, but encouraged by steadfast friends such as critics Pauline Kael and Sheila Benson and working a PR job--that he accepted a fancy dinner invitation with a client and would happen on Seymor. “When she asked if I would be interested in doing a show, I said: ‘I’m shy. I don’t know. . . .’

“And this is where my life begins.”

*

“I feel that he’s really found the proper niche for himself,” says poet and old classmate Peter Levitt. “This is a form in which Michael can be creative from the absolute root of him. Even as a young man, literature was the body of love that he wanted to immerse himself in.”

Silverblatt considers the expanse of his new world:

“To sit with these people. To face these people who I have admired. The deepest question here is, ‘What is a writer? Why do you do it? How do you do it? This making of other worlds, imaginary worlds--how do you do it without falling into it, but with intensity and integrity and truth?’ ”

With each answer comes growth, which has been incremental, but substantial, as Silverblatt goes back to understand “that which is difficult.”

“When I started out, you see, I was this esoteric guy . . . who liked complicated books, things that were just like puzzles. And over the years, I’ve truly opened up,” much in the same way that the publishing world has become more inclusive, a better mirror.

“This is a global culture, in a way that could not have been imagined by Dickens and the fathers of the novel. People think they can review a novel by telling its plot, and then decide the amount of space to give it in the newspaper, or the amount of money the publisher is spending to advertise it. This is insufficient. We have to place the aspects of culture in the context of the enormousness of the past of culture, the future of culture, the boundary-lessness of culture. . . .

“We have forgotten how to demonstrate the ways in which books are superior and more exciting and more meaningful than movies. Their relevance is not immediately apparent,” says Silverblatt, surrounded by a forest of books, a world, at once, vast and tangible.

“Otherwise, you see, we are just looking at a boring thing made of paper, pulped from trees.”

* Michael Silverblatt is to participate in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, concluding today at UCLA. For information, call (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 7BOOK.

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The Bookworm’s Rules

1) Sit. If you’re lying down you’ll fall asleep.

2) Read at least 100 pages in your first session with a new book. You must get well in.

3) If you’re reading for pleasure, finish a book before starting a new one. Don’t keep three or four going.

4) If your eyes get tired, try cotton compresses with witch hazel--they’re soothing and refreshing.

5) Read a book about a country you’ve never visited.

6) Ask close friends to name their favorite book, one that changed their life or one that accompanied a change in life. You will learn not just about the book, but about the person who recommended it.

7) Don’t be embarrassed to keep a vocabulary list. Reading without understanding is not a virtue.

8) Don’t torture yourself or read out of duty. A great book has an obligation to enrich and alter your life.

9) There are certain books you’ll find you’re not ready for. Please suspend your judgment of them. It took me seven years and six tries to read Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.”

10) If you can’t discard preconceptions that come from bad classroom experiences--for example, “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Silas Marner” are not Dickens’ or Eliot’s best works--if you’ve X’d them out of your list, you’re missing something of pleasure. You’re ready now. Try them.

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Books by Authors in Our Own Backyard

Here are 10, er, 11 books by writers living in L.A. that the bookworm recommends highly.

* “Visitations” by Mitch Sisskind (Brightwater Press)

* “Blood Lake” by James Krusoe (Boaz Publishing)

* “Guide” by Dennis Cooper (Grove Press)

* “Maps to Anywhere” by Bernard Cooper (Penguin)

* “Crown of Weeds” by Amy Gerstler (Penguin)

* “Dear Dead Person” by Benjamin Weissman (High Risk)

* “I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots” by Susan Straight (Hyperion)

* “Chinchilla Farm” by Judith Freeman (Norton)

* “Sea of Cortez” by John Steppling (Sun and Moon)

* “We Find Ourselves in Moontown” by Jay Gummerman (Vintage)

* “Round Rock” by Michelle Huneven (Knopf)

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Michael Silverblatt

Claim to fame: L.A.’s most passionate evangelist for the written word; producer and host of the weekly literary show “Bookworm” on KCRW-FM (89.9).

Back story: 44; grew up in Brooklyn; graduated from State University of New York at Buffalo; lives in Fairfax district.

Passions: Books, books and more books.

On reading: “I don’t have a photographic memory. I’m not a fast reader. I don’t know how to speed read. I don’t approve of [it]. I think it keeps you from seeing the things that you need to see.”