Talk radio is not all bad. Here in the Bay Area we have living proof of that little known fact: a daily on-air salon called Forum. (Those outside Northern California can find it online or on Sirius.) Hosted by local polymath Michael Krasny, the show ranges into all topics, from art and science to politics and current events, and Krasny more than holds his own with experts and luminaries in their respective fields. But Krasny’s favorite subject matter, and first love, is literature.

As a longtime English professor at San Francisco State, it’s not surprising that he takes special pleasure in talking about books and writing. Yet, even before I read his new memoir Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, I always detected a keener interest in Krasny’s mellow tenor during his segments with writers, a higher emotional octane than just literary scholarship. And after reading his engaging new retrospective on his life, I now understand why.

Like millions of others, myself included, Krasny dreamt in his youth of becoming a great writer, of penning volcanic, world-altering prose. But like prenatal Jacob and Esau, this yen warred inside of him with an equally formidable desire, to be what his literary idol Saul Bellow called simply, “a good man”; or, in the language of his working class childhood in Cleveland, a mensch. And just as Jacob finagled Esau’s birthright from him, Krasny’s more practical aspirations (academic career, family, and stability) gradually won out over what he calls his “feral” writer self.

“Good, kind and nice seemed more the path for me,” he writes at one point, contrasting himself to James Joyce’s alter-ego Stephen Dedalus. “I wanted to be the nice, Jewish boy who makes his family proud.”

As the above quote indicates, any reader looking for an Augustin Burroughs type spree of quirky-kinky dysfunction should definitely look elsewhere. Off Mike is not the zany tale of ‘I was such a fuck-up!’-anguish and Oprah Winfrey-grade redemption that many have unfortunately come to expect from the memoir genre. Indeed, by anyone’s lights, Krasny has made his family proud. He has a loving family of his own, a rewarding career, and even some measure of the fame he once sought as a wordsmith. Moreover, after three decades in radio, he has, as he notes in the book’s introduction, “interviewed more writers, perhaps, than anyone ever has or will or should.”

Krasny intersperses his own life story with vignettes on dozens of his past interview subjects, like Joan Didion, VS Naipaul, and Barbara Kingsolver. He recounts radio sessions with them, and muses on their personalities and their output. The result is an impressive, maybe even historic, menagerie of contemporary writers and literati; although, in what becomes a sort of running irony that Krasny may or may not have intended, many of these figures tell him how fruitless it is to talk to writers about writing. Early on, for instance, E.L. Doctorow declaims, “The last people in the world who know anything about the creative process are those who do it.”

Off Mike is chock full of memorable moments like Doctorow’s quote. And Krasny’s travelogue through the nursery of the talk radio format is an interesting, and often funny, media history lesson. But as a stand-alone narrative, the book challenged me a bit. I found myself wishing Krasny would take the gloves off with himself a little more; risk sounding raw, or even inarticulate for the sake of bringing me into the story rather than somewhere in the distance, receiving it like a radio signal.

On Forum every morning, Krasny has an affably incisive air with his subjects. He is always prepared, always knowledgeable of their lives and their work, and he takes their answers with a pro’s ease and charm. Yet here, as his own self sits in the proverbial other chair, this approach often yields expository passages that pay out his story faithfully, and I’m sure accurately, but that do not pull at reader’s emotions. While discussing the problems with his early attempts at fiction, he actually articulates many of my, albeit minor, difficulties with Off Mike itself. “I needed…conflict that would show the edges and crannies of deeper humanity,” he declares. “I needed to dramatize rather than summarize.”

Krasny’s sometimes painfully honest examinations of his own literary shortcomings made me ruminate on the whole absurd idea of writing or making art. Maybe he’s just too damn happy, I thought, too generous and open. Maybe a good writer needs to be acerbic and closed into his own world; someone incapable, like Doctorow, of understanding or caring about his own drive to create. Talking about writing, paradoxically, might just smother one’s voice. Talking about talking about writing might just kill the Muse outright.

And then there’s the whole notion of conflict. Readers like conflict. Aristotle knew that millennia ago. Aaron Spelling and Flannery O’Connor and the inventors of telenovelas knew that. But do you have to be miserable to find it, to earn it? Do you have to pull a Faust or a Robert Johnson and sacrifice your eternal well being just to write a god damned story? By eschewing the risky and lonely life of a writer, did Krasny surrender the mill grist of pain and drama that comprise a rollicking yarn?

Of course, there are no answers to these questions. And when all is said and done, Off Mike is a worthy, courageous effort that I probably have no business opining on. Krasny is so well read, such an expansive and acquisitive mind, his writing brims over with tasty anecdotes and snippets of scholarship. Just about every page taught me something or reminded me of something I’d forgotten or pointed to some larger knowledge that I can only aspire to. Only a true man of learning could create a book like this, and only after a lifetime dedicated to his love of writing and the arts.

That ain’t bad. That ain’t bad at all.

——
JB Powell is the author of The Republic: A Novel and a contributing writer at P+P.