Manhood for Amateurs

About the Author

Meet Michael Chabon

MICHAEL CHABON is the author of six novels, among them The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Yiddish Policemen’S Union, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He’s written two collections of stories, edited not just an edition of the Best American Short Stories but also two collections of writing for McSweeney’s, and this week he publishes his second collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs.

Here are some simple facts about him. He is a virtuosic storyteller, a master of large-hearted, complex works of literature that integrate colossal slabs of culture and history with a fearless, wild imagination. If he is subversive, weird, and drawn to the uncharted playing fields of the human project, he is equally a writer of the most vibrant feeling, able to pin a reader’s sympathies to the most diverse group of characters. What is this talent, getting us to care more for people who don’t exist than we do about our own family members? Not sure what to call it, but Chabon has a big dose of it. More facts. He is a narrative writer with the immersive gifts of Dickens. A complex cast of characters test their desires and run from their fears in his books, or they deny their desires and perilously confront what terrorizes them. You can be sure that the conflict that arises in his novels — the spectacle of humans picking away at each other’s weaknesses — comes from some ineffable, organic place and suddenly overwhelms us with its inevitability.

“When I read his work, I see … a writer who draws from the whole tool kit of storytelling, using whatever resources and riches suit his material.”

A lot is made of how Chabon traverses the boundaries between several literary genres: the mystery, the hard-boiled detective noir, fantasy, science fiction, and plain old literature. Maybe some others. But when I read his work, I see no traversing at all but rather a writer who draws from the whole tool kit of storytelling, using whatever resources and riches suit his material. I see no conscious blending of high and low forms, no attempt to domesticate science fiction or elevate the mystery to the status of literature. Chabon is a writer who shows us how inexhaustible the methods of storytelling really are, and he uses the available techniques that bring his worlds fully to life. By ignoring the distinctions between genres, he creates a genre unto himself. In so doing, he connects us to the very foundations of literature — literature as a spell, literature as magic, before there were bookstores to worry about the question of categories.

And does it really matter what the genre is when the resulting work is more blown out with color and feeling than the life we live outside of books? I am sometimes saddened to think that I have to read novels like Chabon’s to experience the fullness, the complexity of life. But it’s true. In his language we can meet the great contradictions of the species, hear the most difficult secrets, and simply watch vivid spectacles unfold, none of which ever quite happens — at least to this lush degree — in what is known as real life.

“[Chabon] connects us to the very foundations of literature — literature as a spell, literature as magic, before there were bookstores to worry about the question of categories”

The point is, the experiences he makes in his novels can only be found there, which makes his work all the more exceptional. His books add something new to the world, a depth of reality only possible through his artful arrangement of language. This is the most powerful argument for literature that I know. Without his books we would be missing a part of the world. They provide a space for what could not happen otherwise. Our world would be lonely and incomplete without his books, and we’re lucky to have him here with us today.

About the book

Subwoofer Submarine

I JUST SPENT EIGHT WEEKS working on a screenplay ten hours a day while listening to the same three albums — Popol Vuh, Einsjäger & Siebenjäger (1974); The Six Parts Seven, Casually Smashed to Pieces (2007); and the Jerome Moross soundtrack to the 1958 film The Big Country—on infinite repeat. All the tracks were AAC files that I had downloaded from the iTunes Music Store, and I was listening to them through a pair of small, attractive podules that connected to my iMac through its FireWire port. This is, roughly, the setup that I have been using for a long time now, since before there was an iTunes, or an iPod, or a Napster, back when the only MP3s available were those you had ripped yourself. And though I also listen to music in the kitchen, in the car, on airplanes, and while running, given the amount of time that I spend at my desk, and the fact that I listen to music constantly while writing, over the past ten years I have probably listened to more music in the form of MP3s playing through cute little pods placed about three feet from my head than in any other way. So I was surprised, last week, when for no apparent reason, while writing a big Martian air battle scene, I looked up from the iMac’s monitor to one of those cute little FireWire ovoids, as Vuh lead guitarist Daniel Fichelscher attempted unbelievably intricate and beautiful things on the title track of Einsjäger, and thought: Dude, what’s with the Fisher Price speakers?

You might suppose that repetition would have dulled my powers of aural discernment — this must have been the fiftieth or sixtieth time I’d listened to the track over the past two months— but on the contrary, it abruptly seemed to have heightened them, to have broken through the dam of convenience, simplicity, and ready access to the music, to have flooded my jaded ear with sudden understanding. I’m no audiophile; I want to say that right off. I have no idea what impedance is, or how to set the levels of an equalizer with any confidence or panache, and I still find infantile amusement in saying the word “woofer.” But it struck me all at once that the sound quality of the music I’d been listening to so heavily, with the indirect attentiveness I give music when I’m writing, was thin, brittle; all sheen and no depth. It was tinny, tiny, and pallid. It sounded like shit, in fact; and not only did it sound like shit, but it had been sounding like shit for years. Shit in the kitchen, playing from a big hard drive attached to an old PowerBook, through a couple of small, flush-mounted wall speakers. Shit in the minivan and the Prius, patched from an iPod through factory-installed speakers greased over with a scurf of children and their miasmas. Shit through the endless, vaguely rattling series of earbuds — that nauseating term, with its suggestion of Van Goghesque mutilations — accompanying me on morning runs and onto airplanes. The digitized music itself “compressed,” “lossy,” reduced to a state of parity with whatever system I consigned it to. With the possible exception of books, I love music more than I love anything in my life that is not a person or a dog. At one time, I now realized, I had known how to express and indulge and nourish that love: with iron-heavy black records, a fifty-watt amplifier, and a pair of speakers that were themselves pieces of furniture, far too large for any desktop. I hit the space bar, stopping the music, and observed a moment of silence for my own lossy life, and thought about a man whom I had not seen in almost thirty years.

My mother’s ex-boyfriend took me to buy my first stereo system, her present to me for graduating with the Howard High School Class of 1980. He was studying electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, his name was Bill Warriner, and I loved him. Bill was quite a bit younger than my mother, who was herself not yet thirty-eight that spring. He wore his lank, sandy hair long, and he took me seriously in precisely the same measure as he found me amusing. He was a wide-eyed, soft-spoken Midwestern guy who had been in the Army and played in local dance bands back in his hometown. I seem to recall that he was a drummer, and I remember his telling me that the only time he ever stepped to the microphone during a gig was when the lights went down and it was time to sing “If,” by Bread, with its line about all the stars going out one by one, and how that would not necessarily be such a bad thing, in the right company. I never hear that song without picturing it being sung by Bill Warriner. He was the first adult I ever knew who felt, and knew how to express, if only through the passion of his talk about changes in band personnel and hidden meanings in song lyrics and unexpected chord progressions, the central truth I was then only just beginning to grasp: that my life was compounded out of discrete particles of time, and that those moments were built, in turn, out of the matter of rock and roll.

Bill accepted his commission from my mother with characteristic gravity and aplomb. He drove me down to an audio equipment store in Laurel, Maryland, half an hour away, that catered to men who knew how to be grave about their audio equipment. It was a no-frills kind of place, tangled cables and metal shelving and a smell of ashtray, harshly lit except for the radiant dark luxury of its banks of tuners, amps, and speakers. I stood quietly to one side, a candidate for some kind of experimental surgery, while my fate as a listener was determined by Dr. Warriner and his team of consultants. Like the planet Alderaan, a record (it was Boston’s debut album, as I recall) was selected to serve as a demonstration of the destructive capability of various audio Death Stars. I pretended solemnly to be able to distinguish among their highs, lows, and middles, when in fact all I heard when listening to them was might, a kind of amplitude that seemed to emerge not from the speakers or the shining grooves of the record but from the mind or thews or rumbling belly of God himself.

“I like that one,” I said, repeatedly.

I came home with a Yamaha tuner-amplifier, a Technics direct-drive turntable, and a pair of modestly sized Genesis speakers, and Bill helped me set everything up in my bedroom, with the turntable and tuner right beside my bed and the speakers at two corners of the room. It was a business not merely of decor but of engineering, of pliers and wire cutters and heavy strands of cable on spools. Then it was time to put something on. At this point, my collection consisted of a number of 45 rpm records, many of them painfully embarrassing (“Convoy,” “The Streak,” Grand Funk’s cover of “The Locomotion”), and the complete works to date of Queen. The bulk of the records to which I regularly listened on the old family Dual were part of the family’s collection — Dylan, the Beatles, Godspell, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon—or they were things I checked out of the public library, discs of passage. I had a feeling that “Bohemian Rhapsody” would probably be an amazing experience on my new system, but as with all the records I liked, the house copy of A Night at the Opera was illused, scratched and dusty, incriminated with the prints of my adolescent fingers. Having just spent an hour at the audio store, where the records were handled like fissionable material or founding revelations, I felt acutely conscious of my records’ unworthiness for the pristine Shure stylus that Bill had decided upon. So I delved into the small reserve of classical albums that my father had left behind when he moved out of the house and chose a Vox Box set of Bach organ music that appeared never even to have been opened.

I slid the first record from its sleeve, touching only the label, and eased it like a pan of nitro onto the black rubber turntable pad. I pushed the chunky button, and the gears engaged with a whir, and like a sentient thing, the tonearm lowered the stylus right into the outermost groove of the record. Walter Kraft began to play some toccata-and-fugue or other, erecting giant structures of sound, the music itself a kind of invisible pipe organ, a madness of stairways and arches and tubes that reached down to deepest valves of the earth itself.

“Whoa,” Bill said. He blinked his mild eyes and bobbed his head in time. “Well, that’s rock and roll.”

“It’s like being in church,” my mother observed. She had come in to observe the dedicatory proceedings, standing just behind the man whom she had determined to be admirably suited to certain tasks in her life and yet woefully lacking in other key ways. The criteria for her decision to break up with Bill remained a painful mystery to me, and yet I did not question them. I trusted my mother to know what she was about. I had known, I suppose, that Bill was not husband material, though it was another painful mystery that he should so clearly be cut out for the job of a stepfather. She had made sure that they stayed friends, and now here he had remained in our lives just long enough to make me the happiest human being in Columbia, Maryland.

“It’s like being on Captain Nemo’s submarine,” Bill said.

I told him that was it, exactly. And then we stood there, Bill, my mother, and I, listening to the mystery.

“Well, now you got everything you need,” he said finally, with the simple profundity of the engineer. “Enjoy it.”

I thanked him with a hug and a handshake, and then my mother walked him back downstairs, where he made what turned out to be more or less his final exit from my life. I closed my door, and turned up the volume, and sailed my bed through the monsters and wonders of the music and of life as an adult, heat vents and black caverns at the bottom, sun sparkling across the surface. The sea of Bach — it was so rock and roll — enfolded me, alone in the middle of it all as Nemo at his keyboard. A stereo system, properly configured, is precisely that: a Nautilus of solitude, a vehicle for conveying one, alone, through the deep and all its raptures.

And now here I sit, with a new set of 2.1-channel desktop speaker sticks plugged into my computer’s sound-out port and a space-invader landing craft of a subwoofer parked under the desk, listening to a lossless recording of Fragile by Yes, and Steve Howe’s guitar is growling like a ship’s klaxon, and Chris Squire’s bass line is rumbling like a whale. The sound quality is probably still not anything close to what I used to get from the vinyl copy of Fragile that I picked up a couple of weeks after Bill took me shopping. And it’s definitely not everything that I need. Nothing is. That’s part of rock and roll, too, I suppose, and something that Bill and my mother and I all understood that day, without understanding it. And like Nemo at my keyboard, I will sail on, through 20,000 leagues or pages, chasing that mystery, and all the others that I can hear, once again, in the music.