2021-06-29
Dispatches from Mac world.
In the 1990s, before the Genius Bar, even before Apple stores, there was Tekserve, a repair shop for Mac computers and printers, the brainchild of David Lerner and Dick Demenus, who had started their tech careers in the 1980s and found they loved fixing Macs. Illustrator, memoirist, and graphic designer Shopsin makes her fiction debut with a delightfully wry tale set at Tekserve and featuring David, Dick, their motley crew, and the newly hired Claire, a 19-year-old with no technological experience whatsoever. Nevertheless, Claire feels instantly at home at Tekserve, drawn as she is “to the type of anarchy that believed in small communities and held the promise of a just society. Everyone had said, ‘life is not fair,’ but maybe it could be.” That sentiment could have been Tekserve’s motto; instead, its employee handbook advised, “If you are ever in doubt, do the right thing.” Claire is first assigned to intake, where she processes the anxious, needy customers who find at Tekserve “a space that was as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine, complete with mutated elves.” The staff benefits from sumptuous Wednesday lunch buffets and Thursday breakfasts, health care coverage, and unexpected raises. With no qualifications, Claire is promoted to printer technician and, at the repair bench, encounters the formidable LaserWriter II, “one of the most solid printers Apple ever made.” Learning to repair its rare design flaw, Claire decides she “has found her calling. One that draws on her full mind and body. A noble calling that helps people make poetry and do their taxes.” Illustrated with Shopsin’s whimsical chapter icons and punctuated with animated—and admittedly silly—conversations between parts of computers and printers, the novel bounces through the history of digital technology, the fey atmosphere of geekdom, and Claire’s shrewd, serene observations.
Fresh and charmingly quirky.
It’s a crisp redraw of a time when Apple Computer was the rebellious choice, poor rebels could afford to live in the Big Apple and — in more ways than one — people found themselves offline.”
—J.D. BIERSDORFER, The New York Times Book Review
“A charming elegy to a less disposable culture and an enchanted workplace predicated on caring for machines and people.”
—HELLER MCALPIN, NPR
“LaserWriter II is an ode to a bygone era, but it’s also a reminder of what it can look like to care for the devices with which we spend our days.”
—EVE SNEIDER, WIRED
"Part roman à clef, part social history, part service manual, part parable, and, consistently, a transportive, joyous read . . . [Shopsin's] narration is sharp and incisive, snarky yet kind . . . By far the most interesting characters are the anthropomorphized machine parts, which form a kind of impassioned Greek chorus throughout the novel."
—STANLEY MOSS, BOMB
"At turns wistful and playful, a novel of appreciation for computers' dust and guts. Like its heroine, LaserWriter II is charming, inventive, and weirdly magnetic."
—ANNA WIENER, author of Uncanny Valley
"Tamara Shopsin's love for idiosyncratic New York City's institutions is as shimmery as the Empire State Building, as confident as a jaywalker, and as timeless as a bottle of Coca-Cola. I loved this precise and funny novel about a corner of local history that will delight anyone who touches a computer on a daily basis."
—EMMA STRAUB, author of All Adults Here
"Reading Tamara Shopsin is like smelling freshly cut grass. The writing is snappy and strange and funny and full of a misanthropic humanism. It makes you feel happy to be a mess and alive."
—MAIRA KALMAN
"It’s easy to forget when Apple was the underdog, full of scrap and funk, giving cold tech an oddball humanity. It’s easy to forget all the oddball humans it drew together in places like Tekserve on 23rd St, the Old Reliable Macintosh Shop, and how unpolished, un-gleaming, un-fancy it was—along with New York City itself, one million years ago in the year 1999. But Tamara Shopsin doesn’t forget easily. As deft, funny, and thoughtful a fiction writer as she is a memoirist, Shopsin, somehow makes a page turner out of a trip into the works of a broken laser printer, into a past when broken computers—and people—were a little less disposable."
—JOHN HODGMAN
"Early 1990s Mac computing” sounds niche, and maybe it is, but what a niche: packed full of interesting people who stumbled together across the bridge between the analog and the digital. If that holds any resonance for you at all, you will love, love, LOVE Tamara Shopsin's new novel. Beautifully written and nerdily precise, LaserWriter II reveals the things we didn't know then; it enlivened my own memories, gave them new context and richness. This is a really special book."
—ROBIN SLOAN, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour-Bookstore
"[An] unconventional and captivating debut novel . . . This singular project brilliantly captures the spirit of individuality, innovation, and change."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
"Shopsin makes her fiction debut with a delightfully wry tale . . . the novel bounces through the history of digital technology, the fey atmosphere of geekdom, and Claire's shrewd, serene observations. Fresh and charmingly quirky."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
"Look, you either love the idea of a coming of age novel set in Tekserve (written by an honest-to-goodness ex-Tek), or you have no idea what I’m talking about and also probably don’t need eye cream yet. Either way, Tamara Shopsin is always worth a read."
—LIT HUB
