(;),

ESCAPE ARTIST

from page 75

As the months slip by, though, Joe
feels increasingly unfulfilled by the
ineffectual, pulp-fisted blows his
comic books strike against Germany.
He begins to pick fights with everyone
he encounters with a German accent,
fights he invariably loses. (Chabon
informs us that one of Joe's opponents
may have been former heavyweight
champion Max Schmeling.)
Into their lives springs Rosa Saks,
proto-Beatnik, first spied fleetingly but
unforgettably nude, fleeing from a sofa
in a crash pad/low-rent comic-book stu-
dio. Rosa will become Joe's lover, the
boys' inspiration for the mysterious
Luna Moth and the third side to a sad,
affecting love triangle.
Joe squirrels away every spare penny
in the hopes of somehow purchasing
an escape for his younger brother, still
in Prague and slowly disappearing,
Vanishing-Boy style, into Nazified
Europe. Sammy, slowly coming to
realize that he just could be, in the ter-
minology of the day, a fairy, sets about
constructing a life no more grounded
in reality than the goings-on in the
panels that comprise a page in the
comic books he creates.
Kavalier & Clay's adventures are
amazing — ranging from the streets of
Prague to tunnels into the northern
permafrost to a high-energy, pre-war
New York bursting with Augie March-
like verve and possibility (including a
tryst in the Perisphere of the recently
abandoned World's Fair), adventures
almost — almost — culminating in a
feat of great derring-do and reckless-
ness atop the Empire State Building.
Almost, because Chabon appends a
lengthy coda in which, in perhaps their
greatest adventure, the characters dis-
mantle the make-believe worlds they
have made for themselves. The artifice
was ingenious, necessary — bold, even;
but they come to realize that it is time to
put such things behind them.
Not childish things, mind you.
Congressional tut-tutting about comic
books (1954) or movies and video
games (2000) notwithstanding, glori-
ous trash will always have a place in
youngsters' hearts.
"The newspaper articles that Joe had
read about the upcoming Senate investi-
gation into comic books," Chabon
writes, "always cited 'escapism' among
the litany in injurious consequences of
their reading, and dwelled on the perni-
cious effect, on young minds, of satisfy-
ing the desire to escape. As if there
could be any more noble or necessary
service in life."

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