Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  So I did not know David Foster Wallace. I thought of him as a peer, but one removed from me by a number of coextensive distances, of space, of aesthetic, of temperament. I had found intense pleasure in his essays and would have been prepared to defend his work as crucial if not signal to our time. But his death has been the focus of my thoughts for the past few days, as if, in a happier world, I had been given the opportunity to know him as a friend. I keep coming back to him in that last moment, hour, day, year of his life, trying to understand and to see and, in some awful way, to imagine the finite series of thoughts that led him to take his own life.

  My first impulse is to assert that suicide is an idea alien to my way of thinking. I guess that’s mostly a matter of wiring and fortune. So far, knock wood, I have not suffered enough from any hurt, or sunk deeply enough into any hole, to wish that my life, my precious life, were over. At my worst moments, in the darkest, rawest hours nearest to perdition, I have always found myself comforted by a cool voice inside me whispering that nothing, not even unbearable sorrow, lasts forever. I have that idiot optimism that is one quarter ruthless and one half mindless: a dangerous and, in its own way, often fatal trait. And yet the image of suicide fills my work from the first novel to the last. Self-interment, self-negation, and the hope, illusory or certain, of escape from the pain of life make up a central thematic thread in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The plot of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union turns entirely on the mystery of self-murder. One of the heroes of Gentlemen of the Road is almost habitually prevented from killing himself only by his hemp pipe and the careful management of his best friend, and in Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp has never outrun the shadow of the suicidal horror writer August Van Zorn. I keep coming back to the subject, to a degree that strikes me now, given my supposed alienation from the act of suicide, as hard to explain.

  My wife suffers from bipolar disorder, which from time to time has given her ready access to the pain and hopelessness required to cast a comparative luster on the prospect of oblivion. When she gets low, I always imagine her mind as a child folding itself inside one of those three-panel department-store mirrors, past and future reaching off in an endless, dim, identical prospect of days, with her own head always right smack there in the way. In early 2005 she posted an entry to her then-blog in which she very calmly and methodically laid out the nature of bipolar II, its burdens and unexpected benefits. In this post she cited twice a statistic alleging that one in four people diagnosed with bipolar II eventually kills him- or herself.

  I was in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the time, in a low mood myself (no disrespect to Little Rock) because it was gray and chilly, and George W. Bush was still and apparently forever president of the United States, and I was alone in Little Rock (sorry, Little Rock), and far from home. I had been over to visit the then-new Clinton presidential library, where they had two electoral maps showing the vast swaths of blue that went for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, a sight that filled me with wonder and despair. Then I went back to my grim hotel room in the rain. The world was all gray sky and pressboard veneer and the map of Everything was always going to be red, red, red. I tried to call home, but no one was there. So, as if to reach her, I went online and checked my wife’s blog.

  I was shocked by what I found there, and upset. I called her cell phone and reached her, but she was in the middle of seven different things, driving the car while wiping someone’s nose while running to an appointment while talking to me. She sounded fine; she was being brave, handling the job, doing fine without me. I hung up feeling that I must have been overreacting to the post. I persuaded myself that in my own funk, I had been reading in, imagining, the hints of suicide in her post, or that if such hints were there, she could not really mean them to be taken seriously. She had a well-known tendency to exaggerate states of outrage and emotion. Surely she was only fooling around, I told myself, albeit in a dark vein. That is the way you tend to think when, like me, your optimism is of the idiot variety. It did not occur to me that suicide was itself a kind of final and unanswerable exaggeration. Surely we have no way of knowing that things cannot possibly get any worse, any more than we can know for certain that the situation will not—perhaps very soon—improve. To declare one or the other by taking one’s own life is a patent exaggeration unsupported by any evidence: a lie. And yet it remains, by its nature, irrefutable.

  When I returned the next day from my trip, I learned to my horror that my wife had come very near to swallowing a bottle of pills the night before. Only a middle-of-the-night phone call from a friend in Israel who had read the blog post and who insisted—staying on the line to see that she did it—that my wife call her psychiatrist and wake him up interrupted the involute downward flow of Ayelet’s mood to the bottom. This friend was one of several people, including a number of strangers on the Internet, who called or e-mailed her with some sense of urgency to see if she was okay. These people had a clear enough view of the world to understand how seriously my wife’s fooling around ought to be taken.

  Who knows why it came upon her and why it departed? Serotonin, hormones, neurons, the light. Childhood, puberty, childbirth, the heavy passing of time. All explanations are cliché, as is the assertion that there can finally be no explanation. In the end I can only try to make sense of my wife’s depression and the death of David Foster Wallace on my own terms, for my own purposes; to grasp or articulate to myself what my fiction has been saying to the world all along.

  The world, like our heads, was meant to be escaped from. They are prisons, world and head alike. “I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose,” Wallace once told an interviewer, “is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.” The purpose or the blessing of that kind of access—which I have often thought of and characterized by means of the word escape—is ultimately to increase our sense of shared experience, of shared suffering, rapture, nostalgia, or disgust, with our fellow humans, whose thoughts and emotions are otherwise locked away. And yet that gift of access, for all its marvelous power to console the lonely and to dislodge the complacent, is a kind of trick, an act of Houdiniesque illusion. When the vision fades and the colored smoke disperses, we are left alone and marooned again in our skulls with nothing but our longing for connection. That longing drives writers and readers to seek the high, small window leading out, to lower the makeshift ropes of knotted bedsheet that stories and literature afford, and make a break for it. When that window can’t be found, or will no longer serve, or when it inevitably turns out to be only paint on the unchanging, impenetrable backdrop of our heads, small wonder if the longing seeks another, surer means of egress.

  Not long before it went off the air forever, KFRC-FM switched its format to Greatest Hits of the ’70s and ’80s, a change that left me feeling oddly freaked. Before the switch, KFRC had been a standard oldies station playing pop, rock, and soul hits spanning the era from the middle to late 1950s to the middle 1970s, roughly from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to the O’Jays and Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. But the core of the playlist was pure sixties: the British Invasion and Motown, book-ended by the Four Seasons and Sly Stone. The switch in format had been covered in the local press, but somehow I had missed it. The change itself, the disproportionate share suddenly given over to music of the seventies, was subtle enough to elude me for a little while. And then one day I realized that KFRC was playing a song by Phil Collins, and I felt a weird minor grief.

  The old format hadn’t offered a revelatory or even, I suppose, very interesting playlist. If you listened to KFRC a lot—and I still listen to broadcast music on a conventional radio all the time, every day, in my car and in my house—you tended to hear the same two or three hundred songs over and over and over. They played not the big hits but the famous hits, aural monuments such as Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” tracks that are no
longer even really songs at all so much as logos of the decade that produced them. The station rarely played wondrous freaks of the charts (say, “Something in the Air,” by Thunderclap Newman, which reached No. 37), minor hits such as the Box Tops’ “Soul Deep” (No. 18), or sixties hits by groups like the Who, more likely to be encountered on stations with a classic-rock format. Certain tracks seemed to fall randomly into intense rotation, and you would hear the Blues Image’s “Ride Captain Ride” (a fine song, I hasten to add, with excellent support from future Iron Butterfly guitarist Mike Pinera) almost every day for months on end, often at roughly the same time of day.

  It’s hard to see why I should have found the format switch so disturbing. I own far more great pop music of the sixties (and of the seventies, for that matter) than KFRC ever played, and thanks to MP3s and my iPod, I can listen to it whenever and wherever I want to. What difference does it make if there’s nowhere on the FM dial to hear Herman’s Hermits sing “I’m Into Something Good”? There. Three mouse clicks and I’m listening to Peter Noone. Two more clicks and I’m listening to the superior pure-British pop stylings of minor geniuses the Honeybus, who never charted in the U.S. and may never have been heard on any radio station here ever. Big deal. So why, on the day when I dialed in to 99.7 and heard “Sussudio” and had the creeping realization that the shift had taken place weeks ago without my ever quite noticing, did I feel that vertiginous despair?

  I’m old. That was my first thought. I’m so old that a hit song from a year when I was already in graduate school now qualifies as an oldie. But that wasn’t really the source of my unease. The length of time required to coat a hit song with a layer of oldie dust has always been breathtakingly short. When George Lucas’s American Graffiti came out in 1973, the oldest number on its sound track was Bill Haley and the Comets’ “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” and that song sounded utterly ancient to my nine-year-old ears. Every song featured in American Graffiti—as with the fashions, the hair, the automotive styles, the whole world the movie depicted—felt as distant, as removed from me as Laurel and Hardy or the Andrews Sisters, though in fact it was set only ten years before its release. There may be no span of years longer than that which separates your parents’ youth from your own. I heard Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” the other day, and I could easily imagine, could feel, just how remote the world of that song and Purple Rain (about as distant from my eight-year-old as Bill Haley was from me) must sound and look to a kid today.

  My mother loved American Graffiti, and it was in her car, in her memories, and with her generation (she was born in 1942) that I first encountered the concept of the golden oldie. My mother liked to listen to a D.C. station, WMOD (“Washington’s Goldmine”). The playlist—as I dimly recall—derived entirely from the era bracketed by Big Joe Turner and Lesley Gore: doo-wop, rockabilly, girl groups, surf music, pre-Motown soul, novelty weepers like “Tell Laura I Love Her,” country hits like Carl Smith’s “There She Goes,” and anything that constituted what was then known as classic rock and roll. “Runaround Sue,” by Dion & the Belmonts (1961), was my mother’s all-time favorite. We used to hear it sometimes on WMOD, and she always got a certain look when it came on, something between surprise and reverie.

  All those songs and, even more, their familiarity and evident importance to my mother—the associations and memories they stirred, the good feelings they engendered—came to mean something to me. Their lyrics, their instrumentation, the outmoded crooning or falsettos of their vocalists, their monaural shimmer, became part of my understanding of the era that had produced them, and of my understanding of my mother, and of the way she saw and talked about her life. Most important, they alerted me to the mysterious power of the chance interaction between radio and memory.

  My earliest memory not supported or supplanted by a photograph is of a song on the radio. I was with my mother in some kind of doctor’s office in downtown Phoenix (and therefore not yet four years old). We were downtown, because in the song that was playing on the radio in the doctor’s office, a lady was singing about what a great thing it was to go downtown, where the lights were much brighter and you could forget all your cares. Things will be great, this lady promised, when you’re downtown. I looked around. I remember a fearsome nurse in white stockings, glass jars with chrome lids, a maternal promise of lunch in a restaurant after the appointment. I think I was just old enough to understand that there was and could be no direct connection between my physical whereabouts and the place referred to by the song that I was hearing on the radio. It was coincidence. I knew that. But that fortuity invested the moment with a shock and a magic that reverberated down the next forty years. When I hear Petula Clark on the radio now, if the circumstances are right—the station AM, the speakers tinny, the volume low—I feel this wave of something old and powerful flowing through my chest and my belly, a bodily remembering of that crucial early-childhood compound of anxiety and the promise of a treat.

  Sometimes a song happens to come on the radio and imbue a moment that way, with its aptness. More often there is no obvious thematic connection between a song on the radio and the memory that it somehow or other comes to preserve, between the iridescent bubble of the music and the air of the past that it randomly traps. It’s simply the magic of an accidental conjunction, a flitting moment and the resin drop of a pop song transformed by luck and alchemy into amber. The radiant shins of a girl named Jennifer Dagenais, for example, as she oiled herself with Bain de Soleil at the Phelps Luck swimming pool in the summer of 1978 are retained in the opening riff of “Hold the Line” by Toto. The Megginsons, and my fondness for them, and the vinegar smell of a bushel of apples we had just picked at Sewell’s Orchard, and all of us crammed into their rattletrap orange VW Beetle, is restored to me for some reason by a forgotten Three Dog Night hit, “The Show Must Go On” (1974).

  No medium is as sensuously evocative of the past as radio. No other medium deploys that shocking full-immersion power of random remembrance. But for the power to have its maximum impact, the process of remembering has to be random at both ends. Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” is playing over the PA in a Gap store at the Mall in Columbia on an unremarkable afternoon when you’re sixteen, and then one day you’re forty and driving to get your kid from nursery school and the song comes on, and there in your minivan you can smell the chlorine from the mall’s fountain, and hear your best friend telling you about Pauline Kael’s review of Last Tango in Paris as reprinted in Reeling, and see the vast blue wall of denim before you, and remember the world in which Bill Murray was God and Jimmy Carter was president and in which, at the Gap, they sold nothing but Levi’s. The song has to take you by surprise, catch you when your guard is down, when you aren’t expecting it—ideally, when you aren’t even listening to the radio at all. A bright little piece of your life passes you by in a car with the windows rolled down, wells up in the pain-relief aisle of a Rite-Aid. That kind of chance encounter can’t happen as readily on an iPod you’ve programmed yourself.

  The sense of mourning I felt when I realized that KFRC had changed its format was not over the music—the music is all there, at ninety-nine cents a download—but over this sudden sealing off, as if by avalanche or detonation, of an entire network of tunnels, secret passageways, into the past. Into history as an everyday thing that happens between visits to the doctor and rides home from picking apples. That is, I was suffering from a sudden loss of memory. Most of my own pop history was still well represented on the updated KFRC playlist. But the process of radio oblivion is inexorable and steady. Just as I didn’t notice at first when a huge swath of the 1960s pop charts disappeared from the KFRC playlist, so I hadn’t noticed when the hits of the fifties had disappeared—exiled, I suppose, to one of those forlorn AM stations that used to play only Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney and Dick Haymes, the last stop before those songs disappear entirely from the landscape of everyday memory, along with the people whose history they preserve, in lu
minous fragments. And now WBIG, the station that succeeded WMOD as the home of oldies in Washington, D.C., has modified its format, as did New York’s storied WCBS before that, and KFRC is off the air, shriveled down to a tiny streaming audio link on the KCBS Web site. “The audience is getting older,” explained the Clear Channel executive responsible for the change in programming at WBIG, “and going away.” Now I know how I will know when I am gone.