World Famous Comics: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
By: Michael Chabon Publisher: Picador Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Picador Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 656 Publication Date: August 25, 2001
This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America the comic book. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.
Amazon.com: Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.
But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.
More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. --Mary Park
Good, but not as good as I expected I'd been looking forward to reading this book for a while. It was both critically and popularly acclaimed - a literary novel involving the creators of comic books during WWII. I thought it sounded promising, but in the end it was a bit of a disappointment (at least for me). On the plus side, the characters were well drawn and likeable, the atmosphere and setting came to life when not overdone, and the beginning and end of the book were very good. The main problem for me was that it was just too long in the middle without giving me anything that really grabbed me or compelled me to keep reading. I've enjoyed quite a few books that were longer than this one, but here I didn't think there was enough driving the narrative forward - to me it often felt like one thing happening, and then something else, and then something else. A lot of the individual plot incidents were interesting and inventive, and some of them did finally wrap up into something worthwhile, but for me it took too long and a lot of it seemed like it could have been cut. Ultimately I don't regret reading it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it either.
Comic history in the making Kavalier and Clay are Jewish cousins, Clay (morphed from Klayman) a short New Yorker crippled by polio, Kavalier a tall brooding escapee from Europe just before Hitler locked the gates and opened the extermination lines. The day after Kavalier's surprising arrival in New York, after his amazing escape from Europe via Japan and San Francisco, Sam and Joe launch the multi-million dollar earning Escapist comic book line in a combination of daring, talent, and brinksmanship bluffing.
The rest of the book is the story of how they survive success and conquer failure. The book reads quickly, with only an uncomfortable homosexuality subplot to ruin the enjoyment of the interaction between the cousins and the bubbling potboiling excitement of the early days of comic books in the 1930 and 1940s.
Masterful I listened to the abridged version of this, which made me miss some of the exposition that Chabon loves to engage in. Kavalier and Clay's lives and the juxtaposition of New York as a city in those lives was very well done. NYC was almost like a third main character. Chabon also did a good job of describing the golem and other Jewish traditions without bogging down the story. Towards the end, a melancholy that stuck with me after the book ended set in. Kavalier and Clay live on, but their lives have gone from marvelous to ordinary.
The novel reads like a film This is an amazing book. There are so many novels being published today that are written so simplistically they are more screenplays than literature. What is special about Kavalier and Klay is the depth and beauty of the visuals. About the golden age of comic books and other exceptionally significant parts of the twentieth century you are carried away by the perfect, constant descriptions of place, atmosphere and human emotion and it is in this way that the book reads like the very best aspects of the very best film. I literally look forward to the film that demands to be made to bring this incredible work of fiction to life. I see Adrian Brody as Kavalier, Elijah Wood as Klay and Zoey Deschanel as Rosa but that's just me.
Well-written, but I see what many are saying . . . First off, this novel never gets boring, which is quite an achievement for something so long. Chabon does an impressive job of telling the tale of two cousins with different backgrounds. Yet while the story and delivery are first-rate, there isn't exactly a literary message per se beyond keys, locks and imprisonment, be this last of the physical, social, mental or emotional sort. Sure, you could go back and write a book report about that sort of symbolism, but you don't really come away from the novel the same way you might with "Catcher in the Rye," "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," "Elmer Gantry" or "The Great Gatsby," but then those have weathered the test of time and "Kavalier and Clay" might suffer from being a work of contemporary fiction in that regard. What author who writes today really attains that kind of status in the here and now? Irving, Updike and Cormac McCarthy . . . maybe.
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