When deadlines loom and it’s almost time for a good night’s rest, I find the surest way to relax is to dip into a book far removed from the one I’m writing. Songs of Kabir? These Hindi poems in English-language translation are the haunting remnants of a centuries-old maverick spiritual tradition. Roz Chast’s What I Hate from A to Z? And I thought I was an ace at worrying. Total immersion in a fast-paced graphic novel (or in the case of Feynman, a comics-formatted biography) always feels to me like a stolen afternoon at the movies – another favorite great escape of mine.
Jules Feiffer put me on to Blankets, a masterful coming-of-age story whose creator, Craig Thompson, Feiffer insists, looks (in the author photo) to be barely more than 10 years old. I somehow missed huge chunks of the Sixties – or did I? Either way, it’s good to have that helter-skelter era summed up in one billboard-sized collection of graphic riffs by dozens of the principals, in The Someday Funnies.
It was my agent, George Nicholson, who recommended The Hare with Amber Eyes, which – have your madeleine ready – is as much a Proustian tale of sensibility as it is a harrowing, true account of the rise and fall of a 20th-century European Jewish banking dynasty. A review copy of Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies & Clowns: The Lost Art of William Steig came to me because I’d written about Steig in the past. In an interview, the late illustrator once told me that his favorite way to draw was by a kind of free association. He would randomly lay down a line on paper, and see where it led. Steig hardly ever stopped drawing, and now we can finally enjoy the cream of what he sketched when no one was looking—or prodding him to get a book in on time.
Marcus, author of the just-published Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, is completing work on a book about Madeleine L’Engle.
