"’Forget about what you are escaping from,’" he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum’s. "’ Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.’"

‘For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Better and Veronica, the icy ball had melted  away without him even noticing.  That was the magic-not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art.  It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world- the reality- that had swallowed him home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means an easy thing to pull off, should remain to universally despised.’

This was a great, great book. 

I am not a fan of comics,  so perhaps a lot of that aspect of it’s coolness was lost on me, but, it was great all the same.  The characters were great, their stories were great. 

It was suitably quirky.  I loved it from the beginning, when as a young boy, Joe was learning to be an escape artist.  When the building the comic book company was in was described as having a ‘collegial air of rascality’.  How close Sammy and Joe were immediately. 

I didn’t want it to end.  I want to know what happened.  I want to start reading the Escapist comics.  And everything else by Michael Chabon.

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