The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Finally started reading this, and I'm enjoying it so far, but I was really thrown on p. 51 by the temperature of the freezing river water: 22.2 Celsius. It was hard to see how this could be a typo. I thought at first that maybe it was some sort of cute bit of magical realism, along some sort of "and why the sea is boiling hot" riff. But then a couple of pages later, he actually spells it out: Twenty-two degrees Celsius. Then later, 8 Celsius is considered too cold to be out with gloves and a hat.
I'm reading the Picador 2001 edition, so he ought to have had time to catch the error. I'm just really surprised that any writer could make such an obvious error, and that it wasn't immediately caught and corrected by his editors. Or maybe there's some weird po-mo payoff later in the book? Mr. Kohut, any theories? 

Laura