Splendor and Serendipity

While vacationing recently in Edward Abbey country (Arizona/Utah), I was saddened to hear of the death of Harvey Pekar, at age 70. Pekar was the long-time writer of American Splendor, a comic portraying the trials and travails of Harvey Pekar - hospital file clerk, Jewish curmudgeon, hipster scholar of classic jazz, working-class intellectual. Although not blessed with artistic talent, he collaborated with numerous comic artists, most famously R. Crumb, to create a fascinating autubiographical chronicle that broadened the possibilities of what the medium of comics could convey, years before the efforts of Alison Bechdel, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi and the many others who continue to produce quality work today.

If you're not familiar with Pekar's work, it ranged from the banal (the frustration of being stuck behind a little old Jewish lady at the grocery store line) to the sublime (dealing with cancer treatment), sometimes in one story (a story about helping a guy move a rug morphs into a surreal recollection of finding a dead sea mammal while hitchhiking around Galveston). However, while revisiting the American Splendor anthology on my personal shelf, I was unable to to find a story I particularly loved. Let me try to reconstruct it.

Pekar decides to work on a holiday for the overtime pay. It's voluntary, just a skeleton crew staff, and there will be a lot of down time, so he brings a novel he's been wanting to read for a while. It's by Isaac Bashevis Singer's lesser-known brother, who I am intentionally refusing to Google right now, just to preserve the spontaneity of the recollection. Suffice it to say, it's a kindo of archetypal Eastern European Jewish novel of the early 20th century, and Pekar has considerable time during the day to read it. Essentially, Pekar's story is an extended, illustrated book review, broken up at various points by the menial tasks he has to perform, which dramatically contrast with the action of the novel being described and analyzed and occasionally illustrated. There is a really effective sort of meta-Thurberesque quality, as Pekar the file clerk/intellectual appreciates the efforts of the writer/intellectual describing the action he's writing about, as the artist depicts Pekar's intellectual experience of Singer's intellectual product.

Incidentally, Harvey Pekar died on July 12. On July 13 and 14, we were in Moab, Utah and Arches National Park, a pilgrimage of sorts for me and my wife. When we first met and started dating, one of the first things we bonded over was our love of the work of Edward Abbey, the desert rat novelist whose seminal Desert Solitaire was inspired by his time working as a ranger at Arches National Monument, a world away from Pekar's Cleveland and the sensibility of American Splendor. But, as I was reminded by our visit to the wonderful Arches Book Company in Moab, there was an edition of Abbey's madcap novel The Monkeywrench Gang illustrated by none other than... R. Crumb. Serendipity is a fine thing.