Amazing Review of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon's Pullitzer-Winning Opus is a Must Read for All
Epic, historic, significant and beautiful, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay belongs on bookshelves beside the best of American literature.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon’s Pullitzer-winning opus (2000, from Random House, ISBN 0-679-45004-1), is a masterwork of American fiction. Chabon (whose novel Wonder Boys was adapted into a critically acclaimed film) has spelunked the depths of American history, the Golden Age of Comic Books, the intriguing world of secular Judaism and the mysterious arts of the stage magician, and has emerged with a novel of epic proportions and timeless quality.
A Great American Novel
Set against the defining Americana backdrop of 1940s and 1950s New York City, Chabon’s novel explores themes of heroism, escapism and identity. Samuel Klayman and his immigrated cousin, Josef Kavalier, a pair of young Jewish idea men, hitch their wagon to the American dream by becoming artists in the expanding form of comic books.
Using Joe’s training as an escape artist and knack for cartooning and the uncorkable flow of characters, plots and events that pours from Sam’s brain, the two create the Escapist, a superhero to rival Superman, and become overnight sensations in the budding comics industry. They battle the Nazis with the Escapist: the first issue of their comic book features their hero delivering a solid punch to Adolf Hitler’s jaw.
Private Battles
Besides their shared struggle against indifference and condescension towards the art form in which they invest themselves and the industrial machine that strips them of their rights as the Escapist’s creators, Joe and Sam fight their own separate battles. Joe’s family has been left behind in Prague as the Nazi war machine rolls across Europe; his accumulated wealth is stowed away until an opportunity for their salvation presents itself, and his relationship with a beautiful young artist, Rosa, is made awkward by his obsession.
Sam, for his part, tries very hard not to admit to himself that he may be a closeted homosexual, and not-too-secretly explores a love story that puts the lauded film Brokeback Mountain to shame for cheap sensationalism.
Historical Truth Versus Historical Fiction
Readers will be hard pressed to extract the historical truth from the historical fiction in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Citizen Kane director Orson Wells, surrealist painter Salvador Dali, and comics antagonist Dr. Fredric Wertham all play small but important roles, as do many historical comic books and comics creators. Kavalier and Clay and their creations effortlessly blend into the stream of reality, into the investigations into the damaging effects of comic books on 1950s American youth and the saving of Jewish children from Nazi Europe. If, in 10 years, Chabon’s novel managed to supplant historical truth as the definitive version, few would register the difference.
Superheroic Fiction
Chabon’s writing is effortless yet complex. Chabon’s vocabulary is expansive and pulls no punches. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay makes great grabs at the unique opportunities of prose, just as its characters explore the limits of comics. The sentences here, from first to memorable last, are exquisitely wrought; the dialogue is realistic, the characters complicated, interesting and sprinkled with a dash of Dickensian cartoon quality that makes each of them -- the perfect Greek god Tracy Bacon, the gargantuan Sheldon Anapol and the wiry Joe Kavalier himself -- an unbreakable mental image.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a must read for fans of comic books, historical fiction, and amazing literature. The completion of the novel is a moment of intense, bittersweet satisfaction, but those craving more have plenty of places to look: Chabon has a number of novels in print, and an award-winning comic book based on Kavalier and Clay’s Escapist, written by Chabon himself and published by Dark Horse Comics, is available.
