Books: The Way We Live Now

There's no guesswork in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon; 38 pages), but there isn't much education either. Spiegelman is also a Pulitzer winner, as it happens, for Maus, a bleakly beautiful comic about the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers--the title is a bad poem in one line--is Spiegelman's very personal take on the destruction of the World Trade Center in 10 monumental (14 1/2in. by 19 1/2in.), full-color episodes. The attacks left Spiegelman in a traumatized, neurasthenic state. (MISSING, proclaims a poster, A. SPIEGELMAN'S BRAIN LAST SEEN IN LOWER MANHATTAN, MID-SEPTEMBER 2001.) For the comic literate, No Towers is a riot of intermittently brilliant formal play. Panels crowd and overlap and invade each other, and Spiegelman mimics a dozen visual styles. A man plummeting from the World Trade Center echoes Winsor McCay's endlessly tumbling Little Nemo.

But the cartoonist delves so eagerly into the contents of his compromised cranium, he loses all sense of perspective. He seems to have no interest in the anguish of others--the actual victims, for example--or in why the attacks occurred. When he describes himself as "equally terrorized" by al-Qaeda and by his own government, he's giving us an equation that just doesn't balance. Yes, there are serious civil rights issues in the U.S. today, but Spiegelman personally has little cause to fear a dirty-bomb attack from Tom Ridge. And if his grasp of the problem is shaky, his groping toward a solution is worse. When Spiegelman compares Osama bin Laden to Ignatz, the cheeky brick-throwing mouse from George Herriman's Krazy Kat, the mind recoils in dismay. "Since every Eden has its snake," Spiegelman writes of Ignatz/bin Laden, "one must somehow learn to live in harmony with that snake!" Bricks are not bombs, and terrorists do not tolerate harmony, still less deserve it. Let's hope somebody finds Spiegelman's brain soon. --By Lev Grossman