The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Comic Books, Magic, Escape, NYC, WWII, and Love Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) is an absorbing, moving, and funny historical novel depicting the lives, friendship, partnership, and growth of the Jewish cousins and comic book creators Joe Kavalier (of Prague) and Sammy Clay (of NYC). It covers the first meeting of the young men in NYC in 1939, the creation of their famous comic book superhero the Escapist, their development into one of the most fertile, successful, and influential comic book artist (Joe) and writer (Sammy) teams, and the increasing dark influence on their work, lives, and relationship of Nazi Germany and WWII. Chabon's narrator tells the above fictional history from a position around 2000, which leads to touches like, "Over the years, reminiscing for friends or journalists or, still later, the reverent editors of fan magazines, Sammy would devise and relate all manner of origin stories, fanciful and mundane and often conflicting, but it was out of a conjunction of desire, the buried memory of his father, and the chance illumination of a row-house window, that the Escapist was born." The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ranges from the 1930s Superman beginnings of comic books through the Golden Age and up to the 1950s Frederic Wertham's The Seduction of the Innocent anti-comic book crusade. Chabon gives a loving and knowledgeable account of the materials and methods and people behind the development of the superhero comic book. His novel is a pastiche of and paean to that art form. He reveals how creating a golem and creating a comic book are both gestures of hope against hope, yearnings to escape the borders of this world, vital vehicles of self-expression. His novel demonstrates that there could be "no more noble or necessary service in life" than satisfying the desire to escape. And that "Only the most purblind society couldn't recognize comics as art." In addition to comic books, the novel depicts circa WWII NYC and American culture and explores the relationship between fantasy and reality, different kinds of magic (sleight of hand, escapistry, comic book art, life itself, etc.), and different kinds of love (familial, romantic, comradely, heterosexual, homosexual, etc.). It is all funny, sad, absorbing, and well-written, as in the following complex epiphany: "As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake." In addition to Joe and Sammy, Chabon creates human, flawed, funny, and convincing characters like Sammy's mother Ethel Clayman, Joe's magic teacher Bernard Kornblum, the "likeable and cruel" owner of Empire Comics Sheldon Anapol, EC's cynical alcoholic chief editor George Deasey, creative Rosa Saks, reckless Tracy Bacon, Joe's brother Thomas and Sammy's son Tommy, and even, why not, the Escapist himself. He writes many great scenes like the following: Joe and Kornblum finding a golem. Sammy having his Escapist epiphany watching his illuminated cousin. Joe meeting Rosa Saks for the second time (at a party in honor of Salvador Dali). Tom Mayflower taking up the Gold Key. Judy Dark finally seeing the Book of Lo. Joe "seeing" his father in Hoboken. Tracy Bacon bringing Sammy dinner at the Empire State Building. Joe encountering a German geologist in Antarctica. Tommy meeting his "cousin" in a drug store comic book section. Rosa asking, "Well?" Sammy watching Tommy sleep. He writes vivid, interesting similes and descriptions like the following: "He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he must have been jumped for his lunch money." "He whirled around, the expression on his face at once innocent and reckless, for all the world like a toddler searching the nursery for something new to break." "Then the sky just beyond the windows was veined with fire and they heard a sizzle that sounded almost wet, like a droplet on a hot griddle, and then a thunderclap trapped them in the deep black cavern of its palms." He writes witty lines like the following: "Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three." "The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost that they might never have existed in the first place." "One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every Golden Age is either past or in the offing." Audiobook reader David Colacci enhances the novel wonderfully. All his characters effortlessly sound just right for their personalities and situations, especially sad, deliberate, deep-voiced Czech Joe and NYC wise-guy Sammy. Anyone interested in the history of the American superhero comic book (or comic books in general), the circa WWII history of NYC and America, the plight of European Jewish people during the Nazi era, and magic should be enriched by this novel. View all my reviews
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