The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel

It's been years since I've been as powerfully affected by a novel as I have been by Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay. Chabon is a virtuoso. The book is full of discrete vignettes, distinct and perfect as cut gemstones. Riveting, humorous, human, and thematically consistent and resonant - these scenes mesh and build and reflect with dazzling skill. When I first picked it up I couldn't understand - "Pulitzer Prize for a book about a couple of kids who write comic books?" Having read it - now I know. Chabon's amazing skill vividly illuminates New York city of the 30s and 40s and evokes the vanished world of immigrant Jews, the birth of comic books, the horror of the holocaust, as well as delineates the aching expanses of the human heart. Chabon's ability to situate you in place and time is astonishing - as his ability to make characters with depth and penetrating realism. Part of this incredible ability to project depth is his eye for detail. Just like "Moby Dick" teaches you tangentially about whaling and nineteenth century nautical technology this book schools you in such diverse subjects as Golems, Antarctic exploration, shortwave radio, magician's culture, locks, escape tricks, Prague, comic book culture & lore, surrealist art, New York geography and culture and the 1939 world's fair. It's larger than life - but feels incredibly real.

But far more than detail - this book's heart is about the many different ways men love; from moving mountains to fulfill a promise, all the way to casual rape. We see men loving family, women, men, art, a dog, a son, men loving pieces of equipment (particularly one loving a radio and another an airplane), etc... We see the stupidity and the wisdom - all the human frailty; and incredible resiliency and strength. It's funny - while reading the focus seems more on the pain - but in the end it's the love and connection that breaks your heart. For all its tragic content, this book is incredibly light and hopeful - and funny. There are a bunch of laugh out loud interludes. This is a wise, human, funny and ultimately kind book.

This is, indeed, a story about a couple of kids who create comic books in the late 30s - but it is far more. It is a story of the American dream; a whiz bang novel worthy of the moniker "Great American Novel". Art, fantasy, love, loss, redemption, and life interweave through this story in a distinctly American way that is beautiful, exhilerating, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting. This book makes me want to live - and more than any book in recent memory, this book makes want to write. I only wish I could write with this kind of verve and skill. I give this book my highest recommendation.

The Escapist, a fictional superhero created by Kavalier and Clay, has its origins in the magical feats of Harry Houdini, the Jewish mythological Golem, the Nazi invasion of Europe, and in the cultural-economic milieu of New York of 1939-1941. Josef Kavalier is a Jewish escapee from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia who has left his family behind. He also has been taught to be an escape artist by Bernard Kornblum and escapes in a coffin accompanied by a legendary Golem. Samuel Klayman lives with his mother in Brooklyn, had been a victim of polio, and his father abandoned him during his childhood. He is also an avid consumer of comic books. When Sammy and Josef get together they form the Escapist. Although the Escapist makes millions for its distributors Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy, and makes its creators rich, the Escapist has the metaphorical power of compensating for Joe's feeling of incompetence in rescuing his family from the Nazi regime and survival's guilt; whereas for Sammy, the Escapist compensates for his physical handicap (his legsvare weak due to polio), low self-esteem, and supressed homosexual urges.

This historical novel, divided in six parts, covers the story of New York from the arrival of Josef to 1954 with Sammy facing the infamous Senate Hearings on juvenile delinquency and comic books led by Senator Kefauver.

The novel has cameo appearances of Al Smith, Salvador Dali, Orson Welles and Dolores del Rio, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, and Senators Hendrickson and Kefauver. Important landmarks and places appear as the background for this fictional text: the Empire State Building, the Union Square, the statue of George Washington, the NY World's Fair, Ebbet's Field Park, Prospect Park, etc.

Although this historical fiction aims at presenting real events such as Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe, World War II, the rise of the comic book in 1939, and its latter economic demise and persecution by Dr. Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the Kefauver Hearings, it uses this historical context as a metaphor to examine the emotional and psychological make up of a work of art: why do people write, paint, or create? What are Joe and Sammy freeing themselves from? Why are they creating these Golems? Although neither Freud nor Jung are mentioned here, their ideas about creation lie under the subtext of Joe and Sammy's story. This is a story of psychological displacement, maternal and paternal relationships, sexuality, of sexual and cultural identity.

Bottom Line First: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Paperback, Picador edition) is one of the best books I have read in years. That statement and the 5 stars insure that many review readers will never see this review. Then again the mere fact that it is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel will keep some folks from considering it. Their loss. Chabon has grasped what it is about the comic book and the pre-World War II era when the industry emblazoned its men in tights into the culture of America. The publishers tended to be a shady bunch and the artists and writers were as obscure as any collection of the nerdy, edge of society types drawn from American depression families and European political refugees. One may reasonably argue that the comic book and Jazz are coequal American Art forms. Chabon gets this notion and enrobes it in a complex, human and magical story. The Amazing Adventures is relatively discrete in it use of language, violence and sex, but the more sensitive reader may want to consider that all of these topics, plus politics are part of the story telling.

At whatever risk there are two major thoughts that will come back and drive this novel: Concentrate on what you are escaping toward, not what you are escaping from. And The Escapist cannot not fly.

Author Michael Chabon anchors the history of the comic book in a few concepts. The progenitor of Superman, the first of the super heroes in another creature of imagination, created by an earlier generation of preyed upon Jews, The Golem. Following this argument he personifies the history of this entertainment cum art form in the persons of American hustler and writer Sammy Clay and his cousin Jewish refugee artist Joe Kavalier. Sammy is just another New York Jew with a story that will be told in small reveals. He is like many Americans looking for that one break that will place him and his family beyond material want. Sammy has a complex history including training as an escape artist, magician and the first family member to escape from Hitler. Escape will be a word that will be a key to his life.

Early in the book they create their super hero the Escapist. A costumed avenger with the special mission to “perform amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains.” They will create more characters and in so doing tell the story of much of the rise of the comic industry.

About half way into the book this plot line wears thin. This is when the Chabon magic happens. All of publishing stops being important. The entire plot shift to the adventure of living. Cavalier, Clay and Rosa Saks the female character… Major point: Rosa is not just the love interest or the common inspiration. She is a third figure, but a character in her own right who demands respect for her role not just as an inspiration to the main two, but as a person with her heroics and weaknesses. Rosa makes her own sacrifices and mistakes. She is second fiddle in the strictest sense, but she is a lot more.

Returning to the second half of the book. Chabon presents us with the Amazing adventures of living. There is a war to be won, but it is a personal war, not one of big battles and hand to hand fighting. There is a small technical error that has a German firing a .45 instead of a Lugar, but never mind. Mostly the heroic adventures are about raising a family, continuing after success and money and coming to terms with the guilt of surviving.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is filled with asides, and deliberate diversions from the main plot. Non-issues inserted just to make you the more ready for the plot to resume. Chabon makes these techniques work. He is doing with literature what the magicians and serial comic book writers do to build suspense and fill out the panels. The magic is in the author’s ability to do in the narrative what he admires in his characters.