Nineteen-year-old Claire is a shy, aimless teen in search of a job. In the opening pages of Tamara Shopsin’s LaserWriter II, we ride alongside her in a crowded elevator and feel her pull a thin, papery ticket with “29” inked across its surface after she arrives at the correct floor. When her number is called, we turn the page and enter into a folkloric origin story of the modern tech age.
It’s no spoiler that Claire lands the job at one of Manhattan’s first indie Mac repair stores, Tekserve, “a space that was as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine,” and, I learn after googling, actually a real (and deeply beloved) shop that existed on 23rd Street in the early ‘90s. What follows is a bright, endearing, and unexpectedly whimsy-filled journey through fragments of Claire’s time repairing Quadra 700s, PowerBook 1400s, LC 4500s, Apple Silentypes, and the book’s 45-pound namesake, the LaserWriter II. It takes Claire almost an hour to fix the printer, and there is nothing on earth she’d rather do. She has found her purpose: “a noble calling that helps people make poetry and do their taxes.”
Interspersed between insights into Claire’s oft-absurd 9-5 are mythic anecdotes about the genesis of Mac and the personal computer revolution. Readers are brought along as then-college-freshman Steve Wozniak and his seventeen-year-old pal Steve Jobs get their entrepreneurial start thanks to the whistle toy in a box of Cap’n Crunch. In another tidbit, I learn that there was once a time when weekly browser checks might display the three or four new sites that had been added to the internet. With each new story, I feel further indoctrinated into an oddball cult of early digital nerds and Mac fanatics.
Among zapped P-rams and data recon dark arts, the tone of a Mac disk drive’s whir is more than white noise, it’s a magic elixir. Claire charms and amuses as she begins opening up to her coworkers and customers, a bumbling and wildly human cast: there’s Patty and Deb; Derek, Dick, David and Joel; there’s Steve Buscemi, Samuel L. Jackson, and Lisa the leopard bush fish. “This is after all New York City.”
The human characters aren’t the only outstanding features of the slim, 200-page tale. In Shopsin’s strange and wonderful Tekserve, the computers’ very parts are sentient. During a vacuum cleaning, a gear is grief-stricken and petrified, a lower fan callous and cruel, and a hook the compassionate neighbor. They shake and quiver. Could they be hearing a theremin? It’s the voice of the octagonal mirror, who encourages the parts to ponder Nietzsche’s thoughts of eternal recurrence: “Do you want to be a coward immortal?” She tells of Herr Friedrich at the Cave of Mithras; she quotes Susan Sontag. In another repair, a transfer drum knob and fat drive belt are swept into ecstasy.
Imaginative, hilarious, and unexpectedly tender, Shopsin manages to carry the intertwining lives and histories of Claire, Tekserve, and Mac computers with masterful precision; I find myself looking at my laptop a little differently now.