MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
When you start a book, you should read the first hundred pages in one sitting. That was one of Michael Silverblatt's reading rules. For more than 30 years, he interviewed authors on his syndicated KCRW show Bookworm - Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, many more. Silverblatt died this week. He was 73. NPR's Andrew Limbong has our appreciation.
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ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: It's 1996, and an author named David Foster Wallace has just published a wiry, ambitious tome of a novel titled "Infinite Jest." He's on Bookworm to talk about it, and here's Michael Silverblatt's first question.
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MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: Something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Expand on that.
SILVERBLATT: It occurred to me that the way in which...
LIMBONG: There's no wind up trying to make the characters relatable to a general audience or hitting on some of the more universal themes of the book. We're one minute into the interview - including that old and timey music intro - and it's straight to business, talking about the form and the craft of writing with Silverblatt comparing the book to a repeating geometric pattern.
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SILVERBLATT: And I don't know this kind of science, but it just - I said to myself, this must be fractals.
WALLACE: It's - I've heard you are an acute reader. That's one of the things structurally that's going on. It's actually structured like something called the Sierpinski gasket.
CONNIE ALVAREZ: He knew an author's work.
LIMBONG: Connie Alvarez was a producer on the show for eight years. She said writers on the show respected that he not only read their latest book, but their first book and the books in between, and he read them deeply.
ALVAREZ: Here's the thing about him. He didn't write anything down (laughter). He just had this memory where he would say, on Page 83 of the previous - you know, your novel X-Y-Z, you said this. And then over here, in this current novel, you allude to it by this or that. And it was just amazing to see how he put all the pieces together without any notes.
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SILVERBLATT: There is, in the world of your books, some kind of intrinsic goodness.
LIMBONG: This is from Silverblatt's interview with Ann Patchett in 2016 after she published her novel "Commonwealth."
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SILVERBLATT: There are threats from outside, always. That's what makes a novel. But I was very happy to be shown yet again how people can save themselves.
ANN PATCHETT: I think that's very true, and it's one of the real benefits of...
LIMBONG: Silverblatt started the show in 1989, and it ran until he retired in 2022 for health reasons stemming from his diabetes. In those 30-plus years, he got raw and honest interviews out of authors, a lot of whom, under most circumstances, would be hard interviews. He told the "LA Review Of Books" podcast in 2015 how he got the most out of authors.
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SILVERBLATT: I don't break my gaze when I'm talking to a writer. I learned that trick, and it is a trick from Joan Didion.
LIMBONG: It was something she learned interviewing Squeaky Fromme, one of Charles Manson's most famous followers.
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SILVERBLATT: And it works better on novelists even than on girl members of gangs.
LIMBONG: Michael Silverblatt lived a book lover's dream. And by that, I don't mean he got to read and interview writers every day. I mean he had two apartments - one to live in, and another for his books.
Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF KATZROAR'S "POMEGRANATE SEEDS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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