Exit the Critic

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Amanda Rivkin/AFP/Getty The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s erstwhile book critic recalls his years covering our most literate city—including the question he dared ask Martin Amis and the Nobel winner who loved The Simpsons.

Up the hotel elevator I would head, then down the long hallway until I found the right room. Finally, I would knock on the door, then wait a few moments until it was opened by John Updike. Or Joan Didion. Or Stephen King. Or Caroline Kennedy. Or Terry McMillan. Or Greg Louganis. Or Katharine Graham. Or Ian McEwan. And then, once pleasantries had been exchanged, it would begin – the strangely intimate song-and-dance known as the author interview, usually lasting an hour, just the two of us in a hotel room, my questions, the author’s responses.

Alice Sebold signed her book at the close of the interview and then added a nifty caricature of a big dog along with an enthusiastic “WOOF!”

No more. My job as a newspaper book critic came to an abrupt end this week when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington’s oldest newspaper, established 1863) ceased publication on Tuesday, the latest casualty in the national newspaper implosion that also claimed the Rocky Mountain News just 19 days before. The P-I became the first major American metro paper to revert to an online-only presence, but seattlepi.com will operate with only a skeleton crew of 20 people, mostly younger staffers, plus a few star columnists turned freelance contributors, but no feature writers, no arts critics. We joined 150 fellow P-I journalists whose last interviews had the tables turned – exit interviews conducted by Hearst Corporation human resources personnel, some from as far away as Houston, discussing our severance packages, unemployment claims and other important facets of our newly jobless lives.

For more than a decade, I held the coveted book beat in a town that trades places every year or so with Minneapolis for the crown as “America’s most literate city.” This confirmed book lover, ever since the childhood discovery of the Hardy Boys, was in lit heaven, not only writing weekly book reviews but also interviewing and profiling countless authors. If a writer’s national book tour included the West Coast, it always included Seattle, since this great gray city of passionate readers not only boasts one of the country’s longest running big-name author series (Seattle Arts & Lectures) but also three flourishing independent bookstores with crowded calendars of nightly author events (University Bookstore, Third Place Books, and the legendary Elliott Bay Book Co., widely considered the national pioneer in author readings).

I was a direct beneficiary of Seattle’s literary largesse, offered the opportunity to interview, at one time or another, just about any author who succumbed to a publisher’s request to hit the road, plus many notables who live in the Seattle area, including such prominent authors as Tom Robbins, Sherman Alexie, Jayne Ann Krentz, Timothy Egan, Terry Brooks, Tess Gallagher, Erik Larson and David Guterson. The P-I did not have the once-traditional Sunday book pages – the Seattle Times produced almost all of the Sunday edition. But the P-I gave copious coverage to books and authors during the rest of the week, including a book page in the Friday entertainment tabloid magazine that spotlighted three authors with events in Seattle during the coming week. Deciding who would get those three spots was often a very tough call for me. P-I stories were also distributed across the country by the New York Times Wire Service, giving added clout to a Seattle paper that always played the role of feisty underdog, proudly wearing the cloak of “the writer’s paper” in this city.