Although Joe had never forgotten the girl whom he had surprised that morning in Jerry Glovsky’s bedroom, he saw that, in his nocturnal reimaginings of the moment, he had badly misremembered her. He never would have recalled her forehead as so capacious and high, her chin as so delicately pointed. In fact, her face would have seemed overlong were it

She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of

The candy-colored pavilions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark’s fins, golden grilles, and honeycombs, the Italian pavilion with its entire façade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials,

Antarctica was beautiful—even Joe, who loathed it with every fiber of his being as the symbol, the embodiment, the blank unmeaning heart of his impotence in this war, had felt the thrill and grandeur of the Ice. But it was trying, at every moment you remained on it, to kill you. They could not let their guard down for a moment; they had all known

Sammy raised his eyebrows and let out a short sigh. Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve. “Couldn’t you have just called?” Rosa said. “I’m sure I would have invited you.”

At her words, the touch of her hand, her pronouncing of his short blank American name devoid of all freight and family associations, Joe was overcome with a flood of gratitude so powerful that it frightened him, because it seemed to reflect in its grandeur and force just how little hope he really had left.

The drop-off in quality that followed the original-content revolution was immediate and precipitous. Lines grew tentative, poses awkward, compositions static, backgrounds nonexistent. Feet, notoriously difficult to draw in realistic depth, all but disappeared from the panels, and noses were reduced to the simplest variations on the twenty-second

He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of

It was probably just as well. The man was Max Ernst, not merely an artist whose work Joe admired but a committed anti-fascist, public enemy of the Nazis, and fellow exile.